Inspiration
Students need data about the major they are pursuing, or considering pursuing, so they can see what the requirements are. They should have the information necessary to plan out their degrees.
What it does
This application helps students plan their schedules or decide whether IS/CS is the right major for them. It provides intuitive graphs and answers questions by querying a large database of current students and graduates. The application has three parts: a degree planner, a general FAQ, and a page showing overall student data.
How we built it
I used React, custom APIs that I wrote, and Gemini as the AI advisor.
Challenges we ran into
The app relies heavily on the AI model to produce quality answers for the user, and those answers are limited by the model's context window. A weaker model will hallucinate answers that aren't consistent with the data.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
The backend catches errors, and the frontend is easy to navigate. Most of my work went into writing comprehensive API calls that give Gemini the correct information, so it can't override the data and gives answers that make sense. I also used semantic caching to avoid generating an entirely new answer when a similar prompt has already been answered.
What we learned
I learned how AI APIs work and how to structure their responses into data we can use.
What's next for DoIT Advisor
I plan to overhaul the frontend to make it more polished. Since most of the frontend was generated with Claude, it needs a redesign to achieve a better aesthetic.
