Yi Lu
The Problem
US colleges receive a high volume of applications every year. This is a huge workload for admission officers (AOs) as they usually go through several rounds of reading the materials, let alone it is a holistic review that requires insights into one's academic performance and personal characteristics. By creating the dashboard, I aim to help admission officers efficiently grasp applicants' backgrounds and gain deeper insights.
The Solution
1. Standardized Test & GPA
I visualized how the applicant's standardized test and GPA are compared to other students' with scatterplot to see one's chances of admission.
2. Main Essay
I visualized the frequency of words in the main essay with word cloud
and extracted key information into 3-4 summarization sentences by using the lexRankr library to provide a glimpse before the reader dive into details. This helps AOs capture the important information while skimming.
3. Extracurricular Activities
I converted the extracurricular activities table on the Common Application into a stacked bar chart and a flipped bar chart to show how much time is spent in each category of activities across grades and overall, so that AOs can better understand applicant's activities path and pursuit.
4. Recommendation Letter
I did the sentiment analysis of the recommendation letters by sentences, and visualize it with bar charts. Each bar chart stands for the sentiment of each sentence. The hovering text shows the number of the sentence, the sentiment and the content. It can help AO quickly locate sentences with negative sentiment.
Skill Set
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Wrangle text data and perform data cleaning such as removing numbers, punctuation, and stopwords.
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Apply libraries such as ggplot2 and plotly to visualize the dataset through scatterplot, stacked bar chart, and flipped bar chart.
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Plot word cloud and do sentiment analysis.
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Navigate R shiny app to build the interactive web app.