About

DegreeView analyzes college course catalogs and presents them in a more structured, interactive way. Courses, degree plans, and program data are organized into tables, visualizations, and downloadable files.

The idea started with a simple observation: college students spend a lot of time navigating course catalogs. My idea was to present them in a new way. Its not a tool thats a replacement for anything, just something that hopefully makes engaging with the courses at a schools catalog a little bit more interesting.
Its a new way to browse and interact with courses.

The first version focused on visualizing degree plans at UT Austin. Focusing on degree plans is much more difficult and comprehensive. After shifting to course catalogs, DegreeView expanded into a system designed to support multiple universities and scale across different catalogs.

This project was also built as a way to improve programming skills and explore how far a data-driven platform like this can go.

This project consists of a lot of data analysis and data engineering. All data is sourced directly from university catalog pages.

The backend is built in Python using libraries such as BeautifulSoup and Requests for web scraping, SQLite3 for data storage and retrieval, and OpenPyXL for generating formatted Excel files. Mermaid.js is used for creating flowchart graphs for degree plans.
In addition the following are also utilized: Jinja, google-cloud (for automating uploading to Google Cloud Storage), ReportLab, Pillow, PyPDF2, and cairoSVG (png and pdf generation).