Inspiration:
We built bag check after seeing the results of incomplete college-decision making criteria: prestige and ranking only gets one so far, and we saw how pervasively stories of students dreading their classes and avoiding their college community were. We realized there had to be a better way to help students consider the fit of a college from the onset, not as an afterthought. Second, ROI is critical to the college process. And as many college students work in the same area of their alma mater, we realized the opportunities a given major had in an area needed to be made clear to students.
What it does
bag check is a data-driven web application that helps prospective college students find schools that match their cultural preferences--not just rankings or test scores. The "Intangibles" side focuses on the qualities you can't find on a college's admissions page: how students actually feel about social life, academics, campus vibes, diversity, and more. The app collects real student opinions from Reddit, combines them with structured data from Niche.com and Rate My Professors, and uses sentiment analysis + machine learning to build a 17-dimensional "culture profile" for each of 58 major US universities. Users take a 10-question personality-style quiz, and the app matches them to schools using Euclidean distance across all 17 dimensions. The "Tangibles" side visualizes the ROI: Majors and their opportunities are visualized using a data-driven heatmap of America.
Results
We ran into issues integrating the two sides of the project into one seamless whole, which required careful rethinking of our underlying code hierarchies. We're proud of shipping a full product that can be used by students to inform their decision-making to reach holistic conclusions, and have learned how to utilize cleaning data and synthesizing from multiple sources effectively. In the future we're
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