CatchUp

CatchUp is a student-friendly site that recommends research labs, social groups, and classes based on personal goals and academics—helping you navigate and optimize college life with ease.

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CatchUp 🍟

Get the full combo meal out of college.
CatchUp is an AI-powered student optimization platform that helps you get the most out of your college experience — classes, clubs, labs, and professors — all wrapped into one smart, personalized “combo.” We use Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to recommend the perfect mix for your academic, social, and professional goals, with a dark mode UI and a playground to test professor schedules like you’re customizing your order.

🧠 Inspiration

We’re college students. And like most students, we’ve struggled.

We’ve panicked during course registration. We’ve taken the wrong professor because we didn’t know any better. We’ve missed club deadlines. And sometimes, we’ve felt like we’re just stumbling through college, grabbing the degree but missing the fries and drink that make up the full meal.

That’s why we built CatchUp, an AI-powered platform to help students like us build the perfect combo meal out of college. It’s more than just picking classes. It’s about finding the right professors, the best labs, and the most rewarding clubs — all tailored to your goals.

Too many students leave college with just the burger — a degree — but miss out on the fries and drink.

💡 What it does

CatchUp helps students build their perfect academic and co-curricular “meal” by:

  • 🍔 RAG-Powered Class, Club & Lab Recommendations
    Upload your transcript and answer a few goal-driven questions. CatchUp uses RAG (LangChain + GPT-4) to match you with the best-fit opportunities on campus.

  • 🍟 Professor Playground
    Compare professors like customizing your combo. View differences in GPA trends, sentiment analysis, class schedules, and more — then simulate different combos until you find the right “taste.”

  • 🌑 Dark Mode Design
    More than a theme — it’s an interactive space where students can test drive professors. Compare average GPA data, past performance trends, and class schedules to choose the professor that best matches your learning style and availability.

  • 📄 Transcript Parsing
    Upload your transcript and let CatchUp extract your academic journey, recommend what's next, and help you stay on track.

🛠️ How we built it

  • Frontend: HTML and JavaScript — dark mode, responsive layout, and professor simulation playground
  • Backend: Flask (Python) + APIs
  • AI/ML Stack:
    • OpenAI Vector Spaces for RAG
    • GPT-4 (OpenAI API) for personalized reasoning and generation
    • Tesseract OCR for parsing transcript PDFs
    • Pandas for data cleaning and formatting
    • Gemini API for retrieval
  • Data Sources:
    • UTD Nebula API (scraped course, professor, grades metadata)
    • Jupiter (scraped club metadata)

🚧 Challenges we ran into

  • Cleaning OCR data from transcripts in a structured and consistent format
  • Engineering prompts for the RAG pipeline that deliver grounded, helpful, and specific recommendations
  • Creating a UI that feels both playful and powerful without overwhelming the user
  • Designing the playground to compare professors in a meaningful, actionable way

🏆 Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Built an end-to-end recommendation engine using transcript inputs and real university data
  • Created the “Professor Playground” — a totally new way to mix and match your class experience
  • Developed a cohesive UX with our combo meal metaphor that students resonate with
  • Made academic planning actually fun

📚 What we learned

  • RAG is incredibly powerful when trained with the right data — and even more so when it’s applied with a fun concept
  • UI/UX can transform how students interact with academic tools
  • That there’s huge potential in building student-first products with humor and clarity at the center
  • Personalized tech + smart design = real student impact

🚀 What’s next for CatchUp

  • 🗓️ Add dynamic timelines for goal tracking across semesters
  • 🔍 Enhance the playground with AI professor predictions (future GPA, review tone, etc.)
  • 📲 Launch user accounts to let students save their combo and re-optimize as goals shift
  • 🧠 Integrate GPT-4 Vision for even better transcript interpretation
  • 🤝 Collaborate with university advising departments to deploy CatchUp at scale
  • 🏀 Add athletic endeavors (intramural teams)

Made with 💛 by Team CatchUp — helping students get the whole combo meal out of college 🍔🍟🥤

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