Chatbot that assists college students 24/7 in exploring STEM majors and careers, so they can be more confident in their decisions.
CASExplorer (Pronounced as “case explorer”):
The “C-A-S” part of our virtual assistant name stands for the various sections provided in our virtual assistants for students to explore: Career, Academic, and Self exploration. The terms CASE and Explorer stem from how an individual, a case, will explore the different aspects within our chatbot. There could be many different ways students can navigate the virtual assistant for their own needs, hence the name CASExplorer.
Educational institutions are one of the most affected areas that are transitioning to virtual learning to limit the spread of the COVID-19. The pandemic exacerbates many students’ anxiety about their academic careers and futures. Career advisors can provide one-on-one support for students to achieve their goals, however, there are not enough advisors for the thousands of students at a university. The move to online services is no different; virtual appointments with career counselors are still scarce due to high demand. In addition, career counselors are focused on providing general career advice to students rather than specific advice because their audience are students coming from a variety of majors.
Existing chatbot solutions for education do some form of the following:
- Answers general questions about a specific university e.g. “When will I receive financial aid?”
- Quizzes students on specific subject e.g. science
Therefore, our prototype aims to take a different approach to:
- Provide career assistance in STEM 24/7
- Assist students who are unsure about the STEM major to study
- Assist students who are curious about switching to a STEM major
- Filter out information from Google giving relevant results on STEM
- Be a universal chatbot for all college students, where information is not centered on a single school
Most importantly, our prototype aims to provide virtual guidance and support to students, so they can be more confident with their major and career choices. In the future, we hope to expand the chatbot to other fields of study.
We created a prototype aimed at solving the issue of high demand in university career counseling appointments, where we leveraged IBM Watson Assistant. It is a chatbot that gathers and provides users with specific information from the internet for the users’ needs, in our case, information to help students explore college majors. There are three main parts of our chatbot, which are self exploration, academic exploration, and career exploration. Users can freely navigate to the section they would like to explore. In the self-exploration part, we use a personality test to analyze an individual’s personality. From the users’ results, our chatbot will give a detailed recommendation on the potential careers suitable for them. Next in the academic exploration part, users can learn about the major they are interested in and get the required skills for that major. Information regarding major popularity, major role, future projection, and graduation rate are provided. Regarding the skills associated with each major, some resources reviewed by the creators of the chatbot will be provided for users to check out. In the last section, called career exploration, users learn more about the potential tracks of the major they are interested in. In addition, the section shows students some professional success stories regarding the specific major area, and allows users to connect with those in the story, providing users with a more enriching experience.
