Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection
Barrett, The Honors College at Arizona State University proudly showcases the work of undergraduate honors students by sharing this collection exclusively with the ASU community.
Barrett accepts high performing, academically engaged undergraduate students and works with them in collaboration with all of the other academic units at Arizona State University. All Barrett students complete a thesis or creative project which is an opportunity to explore an intellectual interest and produce an original piece of scholarly research. The thesis or creative project is supervised and defended in front of a faculty committee. Students are able to engage with professors who are nationally recognized in their fields and committed to working with honors students. Completing a Barrett thesis or creative project is an opportunity for undergraduate honors students to contribute to the ASU academic community in a meaningful way.
Filtering by
- All Subjects: Travel
As the #VanLife craze continues to grow, new businesses are finding ways to meet the demand in the market. For #Vanlifers who own and operate their own camper vans, specialized companies like GoWesty, Vanagain, and Boxeer offer a full range of parts, upgrades, and custom mechanical and systems conversion kits to keep these vans on the road as OE manufacturers discontinue production on these parts. For those who have an itch to try out the #VanLife for a shorter period and without the financial commitment, companies like Roamerica, TontoTrails, and adventureRIGS offer nightly and weekly rental opportunities on fully-outfitted campervans ready to hit the road.
For my Honors Project I wrote a complete analysis on the history, development, and modernization of the #VanLife movement. With plans to take to the road for an extended period of time after graduation, I also developed a complete financial plan for a one-year #VanLife experience. The financial plan includes a comprehensive set of budgets that scrutinize the start-up an operational costs of the #VanLife and associated travel.
I decided I could use my education from the Cronkite School in writing, photography and social media to produce a resource for women looking to travel abroad. I could tell stories of my personal experiences that could both inspire and prove that a solo trip can be done. I also wanted to touch on topics that are not generally covered by popular travel blogs since they are specific to women. Topics like how to dress, making sure you travel during the day if you’re traveling alone and finding birth control or feminine hygiene products when you are traveling.
I funded the trip myself and currently the blog is designed, written and photographed entirely by me. Moving forward I would like to feature other women on my blog, especially those who have made travel a priority or a career. I plan on continuing to build the blog, hopefully gaining sponsors and becoming a more well known resources, and helping change the landscape of travel and travel blogging to become more female friendly.
The problem we are trying to solve is that it still takes hours to search for and find unique non-touristy experiences around the world. At a time when people can use their smartphones to have a car show up to their doorstep in minutes, it is unacceptable that it still takes hours to find an non-touristy experience on the internet.
Our value proposition is that users will be able to be anywhere in the world and be able to find an authentic, non-touristy experience that interests them. iWaandr is the most complete experience discovery tool, providing the largest collection of unique and personal experiences around the world.
Our competition is the large incumbent travel and review companies like TripAdvisor and Airbnb. There are also less established competitors that see a similar gap in the market like Mapify and Cool Cousin. We also have niche competitors that are only focused on outdoor activities like AllTrails and Outbound Collective. Google and blogs would also be competitors because people search on Google for unique experiences.
Our innovation is that we are focusing on creating unique content while our competitors are focusing on new ways to display the same content. Our advantage isn’t in a feature we created because a company with more resources could easily copy it. In order to create unique and useful content, we had to figure out a way for users to intuitively and easily post an experience with as much relevant information as possible. This involved a lot of thought into our posting process. We believe our posting process allows users to consistently post unique and informative content.
The technology we are implementing is very similar to the FERN technology stack of Firebase as a database, ExpressJS and NodeJS as backend frameworks, and ReactJS as the front-end programming language. We chose this technology stack because it allows our platform to stay lean, and be efficient with data. This allows the platform to have increased performance and lower costs.