california community college transfers

the repo for this project can be found here

the problem

reading pdf files, whether by eye or computer, is painful. reading multiple pdf files with different formatting and information while trying to plan the next few years of your life, even more so. while helping my younger sister pick community college courses that would articulate to her target schools, i figured i would do my future self a favor and make sense of assist.org's database that is for some reason in pdf.

the solution

i used pypdf and jupyter notebooks to build an ETL process to transform pdf files into a json database. for a single school there are about 1000 files.

before

broken image here

after

{"away": ["COM SCI 31 - Introduction to Computer Science I (4.00)"], "home": [["CIS 22A - Beginning Programming Methodologies in C++ (4.50)"], ["CIS 22BH - Intermediate Programming Methodologies in C++ - HONORS (4.50)"], ["CIS 27 - Programming in C++ for C/Java Programmers (4.50)"], ["CIS 22B - Intermediate Programming Methodologies in C++ (4.50)"], ["CIS 29 - Advanced C++ Programming (4.50)"]]}{"away": ["C&EE M20 - Introduction to Computer Programming with MATLAB (4.00) Same-As: MECH&AE M20"], "home": [["No Course Articulated"]]}{"away": ["MECH&AE 82 - Mathematics of Engineering (4.00)"], "home": [["MATH 2A - Differential Equations (5.00)"], ["MATH 2AH - Differential Equations - HONORS (5.00)"]]}{"away": ["EC ENGR 100 - Electrical and Electronic Circuits (4.00)"], "home": [["ENGR 37 - Introduction to Circuit Analysis (5.00)"]]}{"away": ["MAT SCI 104 - Science of Engineering Materials (4.00)"], "home": [["No Course Articulated"]]}{"away": ["MECH&AE 101 - Statics and Strength of Materials (4.00)"], "home": [["No Course Articulated"]]}{"away": ["MECH&AE 102 - Dynamics of Particles and Rigid Bodies (4.00)"], "home": [["No Course Articulated"]]}

in progress

the next step is to build a frontend which affords users the ability to build a list of courses that meets the requirements for all their target schools. the design of such ux/ui will be done in a separate project which will be linked HERE in the future.