Funding the Future: A Student-Driven AI Solution

Per Scholas is a national nonprofit that provides no-cost, rigorous training to help adults launch high-growth tech careers. Because the organization's offerings are at no-cost to the learners, Per Scholas relies on external funding sources to fuel its growth.  

Finding that funding has always been a taxing, time-consuming endeavor. Today, when money is particularly tight, fundraising efficiency is critical. 

Per Scholas turned to students in Northwestern Engineering's Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence (MSAI) program and Northwestern's MBAi program–a joint-degree offered between Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management and the McCormick School of Engineering—to see if AI could help improve that process.  

The answer was a resounding yes. 

"We went through the whole process of getting involved with the client, understanding their problem, and then actually putting in practice all the tools that we've been learning, especially when it comes to AI and tech," said Ray Freire (MBAi '26), one of the students on the team. "It was great, just to combine that theory of practice. That was what I was looking for." 

Ray collaborated with Ayaan Pupala (MSAI '25), Julia Schwieterman (MBAi '26), and Meena Singh (MBAi '26) to create a solution that automates the laborious manual process of scouring the internet in search of government contracts the nonprofit might be eligible to earn.  

In the past, Per Scholas would manually determine their likelihood of success in landing the contract. The nonprofit wondered if the MSAI and MBAi students could create an AI-powered tool that would help them focus their limited resources on finding and pursuing the right opportunities.   

The students’ solution uses AI to scrape the internet and find the possible government contracts, then ranks them based on criteria such as past success in landing contracts from the source. 

The challenge was part of the two programs' capstone project, where students from MSAI and MBAi form a team to solve a real client problem. This was the first time a nonprofit organization presented a capstone challenge.  

To say that the Per Scholas team was pleased would be an understatement.  

Just weeks after the students presented their recommendations, the nonprofit had already incorporated the students' tool into the organization's daily workflow.   

"We are so super excited that we were able to get this as part of our infrastructure. It is already enhancing the fundraising efficiency," said Tyrone Washington, executive vice president of information technology at Per Scholas. “This was a very creative solution that was made in 10 weeks. Some consultants can't do this in six months." 

Ayaan said one of the keys to their success was sticking to the schedule they created for themselves. 

“Our target was to have a demo in hand by the halfway point so we could start getting feedback,” he said. “We planned the whole development process quite well.” 

Julia agreed. 

"They didn't have a solution to this problem already, so we were building something completely from scratch," she said. "We tried to make this in a very iterative way. We came up with an initial skeleton of what we wanted to build, then week after week, we added to that base skeleton and got their feedback. That allowed us by week 10 to have a pretty robust solution that they were happy with." 

Creating a successful tool was inspirational for the students. It also serves as a strong discussion point as they seek leadership positions post graduation.   

It also showed them how successful a team can be when it is made up of willing partners.  

“Whenever there is trust between parties in a given project, good things can happen,” Ray said. “There was a lot of trust from both sides, we were able to communicate really well, and, in the end, that's the recipe for success.”