In part one, we have introduced functions that will help school research at nation level, state and city level. In this article I'll talk about features built to help research at school level.
Bookmark
While research schools, it is useful to bookmark a page for later use. That's where the bookmark feature comes in. User can save unlimited bookmarks and manage them by x-out(remove) it from saved list. Convenient.
School summary
School summary are mostly text extracted from multiple sources. The first page contains an introduction, or a quick view, of the school. It contains many meta data that can be extracted to form more data dimensions.
School detail page expands on top of the introduction. One small feature concerning development is that TOC is auto generated.
Historical admission scores
This page lists historical cutoff scores that the school has applied in past admissions. GKP has collected over 2,000,000 data records between 2010 and 2014 and covering 3,000 schools.
Students can then use these scores as reference compared to her estimated exam score in order to get a sense of how likely she will be admitted.
Social life
One important factor to consider, also a unique feature of this application, is the campus social life. Here we created an advanced backend engine to tap into popular social media facilities and pull in live chat stream at 50,000 new posts per minute. This gives students a rich information on how the campus life is like.
Data stream is being updated every 60 seconds. So for a user it is convenient to leave the window open and watch new posts appear on the screen instead of refreshing page manually. Also, there is a voting mechanism behind the scene so that the more users a page is being viewed (thus indicating more popularity), the higher priority the page has in term of receiving the next update.
Based on these streamed social media data, the application provides a Keyword Cloud(shown on the left) that reflects hot topics in the most recent 100 threads. Further, the Live Campus(shown on the right) section shows thread summaries in a scrolling news ticker fashion which makes monitoring these threads simple and fun.
Wechat channels
Wechat is a whatsapp equivalent in China. It has a dominating role especially among young people. Here user will find a list of Wechat channels that are affiliated with the candidate school, including school news, clubs, communities and activities. Connecting to them is as simple as scanning the barcode with her phone. It is another unique feature that makes acquiring school information as painless as possible.
Major
In part one and this article, we have introduced research functions that assist user at different level of interest. Here comes another important consideration that any student must have — majors. What to study is often driven by interest, but also it is closely affected by its future job seeking prospective. In part three — majors we will go over these topics.
— by Feng Xia