Inspiration

Have you used ratemyprofessor.com? It might be a handy tool for course decision but does not seem enough to satisfy our need sometimes: inaccuracy, lack of data, etc. We, as a university student and a programmer, wanted to solve that issue and create an alternative to fully satisfy the students who really care about their university life.

What it does

This application quantify all the given and collected data to provide objective view toward courses for students. It also provides incentives to students who participate for data collection. Furthermore, it recommends or provides relative courses based on student's preference.

How we built it

We used node.js for server which stores data sent from users (rating, comments, and etc.), and we processed some data with pandas library to provide course recommendation. For front-end, we used html, javascript, jquery, etc. to create our website.

Challenges we ran into

The project was bigger than we thought: we needed huge amount of data, we needed to build server, database, and api's for data-transfer, we needed to create multiple pages for our website. So, we planned to use dummy data for our demo because we do not have enough time and people to collect it. We also planned to skip few web pages which are not necessary for demo to save time. However, we put considerable amount of time on design of each page because clear interface design helps readers to interpret the information more quickly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We believe that we've done a great job on establishing a decent business model which is subscription-based but

What we learned

We have learned that time management and setting a specific goal are critical to complete a project successfully.

What's next for University Life Advisor (ULA)

The main purpose of this application is to provide the best chance to enhance students' university life. As times goes by, more usable data will be collected from the participants. Then, we will be able to provide more accurate and reasonable data to help students to make smarter decisions.