Inspiration
We were inspired to make this app because of the pain we experienced comparing financial aid packages from each university we were admitted to by hand. We wanted to create a simple interface that allowed potential students to easily seeing a comparison of their financial situations for each university.
What it does
Originally, we worked on a functionality to allow a user to submit PDFs that were either acceptance letters with financial aid on them or itemized financial aid offer letters and we would extract the financial aid figures (grants, loans, and scholarships) plus the college name from these letters. After doing this, we would search through our database we created detailing the costs for tuition and room & board for each university that the student was considering. Our database contains these figures for each college in Illinois. Finally, the total out of pocket expense for each university would be relayed to the user along with itemized expenses (including room & board and tuition) and funding (including grants, loans, and scholarships) sections.
How I built it
We built the backend with Python. The front-end is built with React.js & React-Bootstrap.
Challenges I ran into
We ran into issues putting all of the parts together. We couldn't get our SQL server running which ended up being a big problem obviously. We couldn't connect our front-end and our back-end functionality or databases, so what we are demoing does not really show what each member worked on.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
We're still demoing anyway :-)
What I learned
More about React, what I need to learn in React, SQL servers aren't as easy as you'd think
What's next for BrightChoice
Connect all the pieces for a functional app hah. Also more visualizations for comparison (bar charts displaying out of pocket cost for each university) and ability to see how much the expected return on your investment of going to a certain college is based on the average out-of-college salary for a graduate from each college in your specific major. Finally, a "how long would it take me to pay off my loans" feature based on these expected returns.
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