AlumniConnect: An Institution-Focused Alumni–Student Networking and Mentorship Platform

Abstract

AlumniConnect is an institution-focused web platform designed to strengthen interaction between students and alumni within an educational institution. The platform integrates profile-based alumni recommendation, mentorship-oriented interaction, real-time messaging, institutional posts, discussions, events, notifications, and role-based access control into a unified academic networking environment. The recommendation component uses Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) and cosine similarity to identify potentially relevant alumni based on student interests, skills, academic background, and career objectives. The system is designed to reduce the difficulty of discovering suitable alumni while providing communication and community features that support continued interaction. The platform follows a modular architecture using React.js, Node.js, Express.js, MongoDB, and Socket.IO, with security mechanisms including token-based authentication, role-based authorization, password hashing, input validation, and secure communication considerations. The proposed system provides a foundation for institution-specific alumni networking and mentorship and can be extended through improved recommendation techniques, scalability optimization, security evaluation, and usability studies.