[21] - Beyond The Book

A tool to visualize the hidden costs associated with attending University

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Inspiration

Throughout our time at university, we collectively observed that while tuition and official fees get the spotlight, many unlisted costs of attending university often remain in the shadows. We're talking about expenses like rent, groceries, transportation. Recognizing the impact these overlooked costs can have on a student's budget, we were inspired to pool our programming skills and insights to create this app. Our mission? To provide a comprehensive view of the true cost of university life, helping fellow students better plan and navigate their financial journey. Together, let's illuminate those hidden expenses!

What it does

Our application displays multiple graphs and statistics showing the hidden costs of attending a university. Statistics including tuition, crime rates, rent costs, and other expenses that most students often overlook and are crucial factors when determining affordability and safety.

How we built it

To gather all the data we scoured government databases, kaggle datasets, and the internet it self to get all of the useful data into an easily linkable series of databases. We used Python for all parts of this project. We achieved this through using the data platform and application framework, Gradio. Gradio was super helpful for rapidly developing our user interface to best show our data.

Challenges we ran into

This was our first time using Gradio in any capacity. This was challenging initially because we had to wrap our heads around the docs. Some members were new to the python programming language as well and had to learn on the fly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud that we were able to leverage new technologies and build something useful in such a short timeframe. We hope that this app will help future incoming college freshmen make the right college decisions.

What we learned

We learned about data processing, cleaning, and management. We also learned about the ChatGPT APIs and how to use them to create a great user experience. Lastly, Python and Gradio were really the backbone of the project and it really helped us move quickly.

What's next for Beyond The Book

We currently have only the Big 10 schools in our application but we like to expand to more and more schools.

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