Studify

[smaranjitghose]

Abstract
Higher education has been known to open new career paths for a lot of students. The boon of getting to choose a blend of the subjects one wishes to specialize in, the international experience and diversity, opportunity to learn about the cutting edge in their fields, and much more. The process of application is cumbersome, confusing, and time-consuming. Initially, students used to be dependent on counselors for this but with more people coming online due to the reduction in internet prices and availability of high-speed internet the information required to assist a student became online. However, there are a lot of discrepancies and too much information for one to process and decide accordingly. One of the best advice can be given by the people who actually made it to foreign universities. But this is scattered across interviews on YouTube, reviews on GRE/IELTS/SAT coaching websites, etc. And people rarely get a complete idea of what they need to have to get into their dream college or even what should be their dream college. A platform where people can share their complete profile beyond just test scores and GPA, including their projects(it's impact, what was the reach, etc), research(which areas, how conferences vs publications mattered), letter of recommendations(whom they got it from, what was highlighted,), statements of purpose will be really helpful. Additionally, it would help them to network with their seniors easily to know more about the opportunities.

Author(s)

Smaranjit Ghose
Anush Bhatia
[ We wish to expand our team with more enthusiastic souls]

How can we reach out to the author(s)?
Smaranjit Ghose: contact@smaranjitghose.codes, Linkedin
Anush Bhatia: anushbhatia1234@gmail.com, Linkedin

Project type?
Web App

Technology used or will be used?
Front end:

• React
  Back end:
• Flask/Node
• Firebase

What problem are you trying to solve, and why?
Providing a unified platform for students to share their complete application experience for higher studies.

Key Features:

• Help in choosing the right university by analyzing complete profiles of previous applicants
• Identifying distinguishable features for one's application
• 100s if not 1000s of real Statement of Purposes/essays to refer from while drafting one's and not worried to pay heft amount to counselors for it
• Getting to connect with peers of the same interest
• Getting to connect with seniors(people who made to the universities) and learning about the opportunities
• Learning about relevant opportunities
• Additional Tools to assist students like Resume Templates, Portfolio Website, etc

How do you plan to take the project to v1.0(stable)?

• Building the front end using React or vanilla HTML, CSS
• Connecting with Firebase
• Inviting people who got admits for Spring 2021, Fall 2020, Spring 2021 to share their profile
• Debugging if required.
• Host on GCP or Heroku
• Launch v1

Further plans:

• Provide Search Options to filter for Degree, Univ, etc
• Fact-Checker
• Invite more people
• Create a dashboard to analyze the application requirements for each univ (D3.Js or Dash)
• Use fast pages to have a corresponding blog where the more elaborate journeys can be shared and we can get officials from International Visa offices,etc to share their thoughts
• Improve the UI (Neumorphic) + Microanimations
• Get support from more platforms like Unacademy,etc to support this project
• Expand this for other streams, undergradutate,etc
• Add more tools like SOP/essay grader etc with plagiarism check using Copy Leaks API

Things to avoid:

• Ads
• Any promotional content for coaching institutes

[ramantehlan]

Thank you @smaranjitghose and @anushbhatia for the proposal! 🎉

This is a good idea to bridge the gap between universities admission and students by adding other people to the equation, who are already studying at those universities. It's great that you are thinking about it.

However, I have some concerns about the implementation you proposed. IMHO, I feel creating a platform for it will be a bit of an overkill, at least initially. Let me explain what I mean by that. Any idea involves multiple hypotheses; they can be wrong or right. Some ways to validate or proof check those hypotheses is via surveys or pilot run or creating an MVP, the point is to put in minimum efforts initially. So even if it fails, it fails cheap.

IMHO, creating a frontend application from scratch, connecting firebase etc. all of this requires efforts and time. A more optimised implementation can be using Reddit pages allowing people to post their experience there; [example]. Even Github issues can be used to have a meaningful exchange; [example]. We can also use HUGO or other static site generators to allow people to push their MD files with their experience. (This is what Github graduation use)

All the above implementations are cheap, quick and easy. And if in future there is a need to add more features and then we can think about creating a dedicated platform for it.

Also, just a thought, getting people to take out their time and filling all the information like LOR etc. is also a challenge, there is a human factor involved and more than often people get excited fast, but loose that excitement faster. But there are early adopters, and people do want to help other people.

I am not at all saying this is a bad idea. There is no such thing as a bad idea(if it's ethically right), just poorly implemented. This is an actual pain point for students today. What I am asking is can we achieve the same goal with fewer efforts, resources and time, IMHO, yes. I will recommend rethinking the implementation.

[smaranjitghose]

Thank you @smaranjitghose and @anushbhatia for the proposal! 🎉

This is a good idea to bridge the gap between universities admission and students by adding other people to the equation, who are already studying at those universities. It's great that you are thinking about it.

However, I have some concerns about the implementation you proposed. IMHO, I feel creating a platform for it will be a bit of an overkill, at least initially. Let me explain what I mean by that. Any idea involves multiple hypotheses; they can be wrong or right. Some ways to validate or proof check those hypotheses is via surveys or pilot run or creating an MVP, the point is to put in minimum efforts initially. So even if it fails, it fails cheap.

IMHO, creating a frontend application from scratch, connecting firebase etc. all of this requires efforts and time. A more optimised implementation can be using Reddit pages allowing people to post their experience there; [example]. Even Github issues can be used to have a meaningful exchange; [example]. We can also use HUGO or other static site generators to allow people to push their MD files with their experience. (This is what Github graduation use)

All the above implementations are cheap, quick and easy. And if in future there is a need to add more features and then we can think about creating a dedicated platform for it.

Also, just a thought, getting people to take out their time and filling all the information like LOR etc. is also a challenge, there is a human factor involved and more than often people get excited fast, but loose that excitement faster. But there are early adopters, and people do want to help other people.

I am not at all saying this is a bad idea. There is no such thing as a bad idea(if it's ethically right), just poorly implemented. This is an actual pain point for students today. What I am asking is can we achieve the same goal with fewer efforts, resources and time, IMHO, yes. I will recommend rethinking the implementation.

Thanks for the feedback. Really appreciate it!

For a MVP, we can even start with fastpages, would take hardly half an hour to setup and a couple of days to modify.

But, the core idea revolves around having a platform for this, so even to experiment I guess spending a month would be worth it. Moreover, since we are keeping this completely opensource, others can contribute as well.

Think about it as an opportunity for people to build a project for their portfolio that will help them how to portray the same thing for masters application (bachelors can be done later)

Well, for the data filling up part, we just need them (who have got admits/rejects) to drag and drop their resume,LORs and SOPs(which anyways they have done for themselves, months back) and we also can treat this as a platform for many people to share their journey(optional)

I can totally understand your point since this is very unorthodox to build compared to all those clinical, supply chains,security projects we can. But I would like to point out that people spend even lakhs (yes Lakhs of rupees) for masters every year...30k-70k for getting an SOP and what not. The number of people going for masters is rapidly increasing every year as well. This can be a great help to the community to save them from all of that. Additionally services like portfolio templates, resume templates are already in building in my other open-source projects.

Moreover, think about the data we can get from here by people openly sharing their experiences. We can use it for analytics of success/failure and an okayish supervised algorithm to suggest universities, with sufficient sops we can even build a custom SOP evaluator( As I specified above) or even use this data for academic research. Another purpose I look forward to is ending misinformation!