Transfer Pathfinder

As community college students, we saw firsthand how confusing and stressful the UC transfer process can be. Getting into colleges is a full process, and every year, thousands of students are left wondering which schools fit their goals, how they can realistically improve their chances, and what their future will look like—academically and financially. Most tools are generic, and counselors are overwhelmed. We wanted to build something smarter, more personal, and genuinely helpful.

We learned a lot in this process. We spent a lot of our time researching the impacts and the logistics of this project. With the right dataset, we can go beyond and get better answers. With the time we were given, we were able to achieve a little bit but we learned the importance of this program.

With our research, we learned that it's not a one-size-fits-all situation. That's when we started to implement the API so it could give the user some personal advice on what they might do to increase their chances. OpenAI helped us turn numbers into narratives, so our tool doesn’t just inform—it encourages and guides.

So how we built this, we started to find real admission, transfer, and post-graduation ROI data for every UC and major. Using a Java backend, we built endpoints to process user input, match it to the relevant data, and calculate personalized acceptance rates and ROI projections. We designed a simple frontend for user input and results display, that looks like a ChatBot right now but we plan to make it Login-based, where users have everything saved, Users will be able to mention their GPA (Maybe a way to link their transcripts), their courses, their extracurriculars, etc. We used a mix of rule-based logic and machine-learning techniques so we would be able to adjust predictions based on each student’s background. For narrative advice, we integrated OpenAI’s API to generate supportive, actionable summaries tailored to each user, where we would give the user a checklist for advice on what to do, with every piece of advice being matched with a number (or points) to there acceptance rates, as a metric of them knowing how much weight that Extracurricular can hold. We also want to change the UI a lot, so it's more drop-down, and the backend is AI, rather than the front end fully being AI.

Our idea/long-term goals: We’re still building! Some advanced features—like interactive roadmap generation, even smarter ML predictions, and deeper OpenAI coaching—are in progress. Our vision is to turn TransferPathfinder into a true digital counselor for every student’s transfer journey and make it easy for students without a mentor to get really good advice and a roadmap for succeeding in their future goals in transferring!