superposition

superposition detects grad school application dates for a Physics PhD for over 100 programs, and finds the top ~20 professors.
superposition sends you email reminders about upcoming programs, and sends you up to date information on Professors' research.
superposition lets you explore grad programs on a 2D map of Europe and the States. We hope to add support.

Inspiration

This semester, I spent time applying to physics grad school. It took about ~75 hours. I came up with my areas of interest, and for each program navigated to their webpage, wrote down deadlines and wrote Professors who interested me (I did this for about 30 programs). This process is important, yet it should be distilled to its most essential elements - finding Professors who best match your interests and reading about them.

I developed superposition \( \vert \phi \rangle \) when I wondered: how could I invent a Genie in a bottle that would make the boring parts of applying to grad school disappear?

What it does

superposition \( \vert \phi \rangle \) is a "tinder for physics grad schools." It is powered by publicly available data which gives students a list of grad schools in their region, in their GPA range, and with Professors in their area of interest to start with. For example, I am interested in Plasma Physics and Cosmology. I used superposition last night to find many of the programs to which I applied. Superposition \( \vert \phi \rangle \) compresses 75 hours of work into five minutes, a 900x speedup. It also makes cold emailing Professors easy as apple pie - and supports written summaries of Professors' research directly to your inbox.

Search grad schools in your area of interest, GPA range quickly.
Cold email Professors quickly in an integrated interface.
Get reminders about upcoming deadlines and a summary of any large program.

How we built it

superposition \( \vert \phi \rangle \) leans on data from over 100 graduate programs, taken from their admissions and physics faculty websites, and imports knowledge from Gradcafe. It's written in Typescript and Python using Nextjs.

Challenges we ran into

It took us over four hours of continuous multi-threaded data achival work (running overnight) to build the knowledgebase to power superposition \( \vert \phi \rangle \) .

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I really enjoy looking at the map of European grad schools and seeing the names of each one! It is so fun to zoom and see where all of the geographic locations of graduate programs are! Also the cold email feature for grad schools, and the ability to send you reports are both pretty fun to play with! Using superposition, a student can really speedup the time it takes to apply to grad school, and this software can be a significant investment to interested and talented students.

What we learned

I learned how to process admissions data from graduate programs, how to use web data APIs, and how to integrate maps and visualisations in Typescript. I also learned how to build web applications fast!

What's next for superposition

I want to support Economics and Computer Science PhD applicants, and release superposition for a small "buy me a coffee" fee to our physics, economics, and computer science departments! I imagine a couple of posters around those departments. For now, for a complete overview, watch the YouTube video above, and download files from my GitHub link to run it for yourself. In the near future, I want to productize superposition \( \vert \phi \rangle \) .