Inspiration
Twitter is a powerful and popular platform that allows students to display their unique personalities and interests. During the admission process, admission officers often have to perform the tedious task of manually searching up prospective students on social media.
What it does
How we built it
As a solution to this problem, we developed a program that allows officers to look up the most recent tweets of prospective students by only entering their first and last names. Our python web scraper then extracts the latest tweets of students and stores them using Firebase, a development platform that allows users to create real-time, cloud based, databases.
Challenges we ran into
Attempted to deploy it as a website, but we were unsuccessful, unsure why Working with unfamiliar technology and finding relevant resources to work with Importing python modules didn't always work correctly which lead to errors in our code Finding patterns in website URLs that were consistent Finding tags to search for within HTML file to isolate the tweet as text
Accomplishments that we're proud of
The web scraper works in a simple manner, needs only 3 simple user inputs Became familiar with Google Firebase technology and learned how to incorporate it as database storage. Able to incorporate it successfully even though we couldn't format our fields as we wished
What we learned
Web Scraping Firebase with Google Cloud Python and relevant modules How HTML and CSS work
What's next for Twitter Web Scraper for College Admissions Counselors
In future iterations of this web scraper, we would implement the service as a website deployed via the Google Cloud Platform to make it easy for admissions officers all around the world to use and access it.
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