ProjectAggie

The story of Majors, GPA's, and Salaries

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Inspiration

The CBRE challenge really caught our eye because it provided us with creative freedom as well as a good way to help out the community. Recently we have observed many people struggling with what they want to do with their lives, with choosing your major a leading factor in the frustration. Choosing your major can be at times be a daunting and overwhelming prospect. With so many majors to choose from you are confronted with a variety of factors to consider, the main ones being:

  1. Your Interest
  2. How difficult the classes will be
  3. Your job security and salary after graduating

ProjectAggie aims to resolve these issues by showing users a way to provide a quantitatively evaluate their options, and have more confidence making a potentially life changing decision.

What it does

The website allows user to easily look up all of Texas A&M classes by department, undergraduate degree plan, or individual class as well as provide them with relevant information such as average GPA for the department as well as reported salaries from past graduates.

How we built it

By using the Selenium library we were able to scrape data to find the average GPA for all courses offered at Texas A&M as well as all the classes necessary to graduate for every undergraduate major offered at A&M. Additionally we gathered data from the reported salaries from student who reported them since 2013. Using this data we developed a model to predict the salaries for future graduating classes. We then incorporated these into a visually pleasing interface on the web.

Challenges we ran into

The main issue we ran into was collecting the data. It took us approximately 17 hours just to collect the data and store it in an easily accessible format. So developing the projection algorithm and implementing the user interface was a bit rushed and we weren't able to incorporate everything we wanted so, such as the companies who hired Aggies.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we were able to complete the project. It was most of our first or second hackaton type events and after not nearing completion in the last one, it felt rewarding to put out a functional project.

What we learned

We learned how to parse through web pages and gather data, and generate graphs from a dataset. We also learned the importance of time and team management, and how to work more efficiently in groups. We should have focused more one one thing than spreading ourselves thin, and not incorporating everything we set out to do.

What's next for ProjectAggie

We plan to update the webpage every year that new data is reported by the university. We also want to organize the data more to provide an easily accessible way for anyone interested to use the data we collected without having to go through the lengthy collection process that we had.

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