UCI Major Picker

Are you undeclared? Not sure about your major and job opportunities? Look no further, for UCI Major Picker has you covered! Simply type in words and our picker will suggest a major for you!

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Inspiration

The inspiration behind UCI Major Picker was our team being partly comprised of former undeclared majors. We wanted to build an app that would give undeclared students some direction as to which major to change into or pick.

What it does

Our app prompts the user to input keywords, and based on those keywords, our app will output a major that is most closely related to those keywords.

How we built it

First, we crawled through every major found in the UCI Major Catalog and tokenized each major overview, and dumped each list of tokens into a JSON file. Every key corresponds to a specific major, with its value corresponding to the list of tokens related to that major.

We then built the app foundation by following the setup instructions found on the React site, while also adding specific components such as buttons, pages, and logos to make our app more functional and visually appealing.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge was learning React and Javascript from scratch, as we have never built a web app before. We spent a lot of time setting up our React application as well as understanding the intricacies of Javascript and its syntax. We also initially had trouble filtering out relative URLs from the UCI Major Catalog that we did not need.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Created a functional web app using React
  • Successfully crawled through every major in the catalog and tokenized specific paragraphs

What we learned

  • Learned how to create a web app using React
  • Learned how to crawl through the UCI Major Catalog
  • Learned more about HTML parsing
  • Learned how to design prototype with Figma

What's next for UCI Major Picker

  • More detailed results page
  • More visually appealing app and front page
  • More accurate results
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