The Wisconsin Experience

Inspiration

Being a college applicant can be overwhelming. There is a lot you may not know about the specifics of a potential major, such as the major's demographics, what classes to take to progress, and how much tuition is. We wanted to compile all this information together in an easily accessible and user-friendly search engine to aid applicants in deciding where they ultimately want to attend university, so we created an application that would help them do just that.

What it does

Our Wisconsin Experience search engine allows users to search for any of the 145 majors offered at UW-Madison (BA and BS separated when applicable) by a drop-down menu and access three different plots for the gender, race, and academic level distribution of their chosen major, as well as state-specific tuition information.

How we built it

We started by dividing up the roles of the project (data wrangler, function developer, data visualization) and processed the appropriate data according to our roles. We then moved on to coding (both in R and in Python) with our processed data to create the data frames and functions that would be used in the final HTML output. Once our code was finished, we converted the Python code to R and worked on integrating it into the existing file. Finally, we transferred all of our code to a web application. Our team finished up with working out aesthetic details to make the user interface more user-friendly.

Challenges we ran into

We struggled with the integration part of the project, especially when taking Python code and trying to work out the same purpose in R. We also struggled to navigate the web application R package we used, Shiny, as it was our first time working with this. Lastly, due to time constraints, we faced the challenge of getting our HTML output to be aesthetically pleasing to the user.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were successfully able to create an HTML webpage that ran our application without failing. We also were able to produce multiple visualizations that gave users a well-rounded view of each major.

What we learned

We learned how to integrate code made from different people all compiled into one file. Additionally, we learned to code while delegating and collaborating.

What's next for The Wisconsin Experience

In the future, to expand the Wisconsin Experience, we would love to work on making it more user-friendly by allowing users to manually type in input and have the engine recognize and auto-adjust the drop-down menu to fit user input. We would also be interested in making the HTML more aesthetically pleasing and expanding it to fit data from more US colleges.