Using A.I. to gather data for college list making?

College Search & Selection
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Hi - I am a very data-driven person and love gathering as much as possible to help make decisions. I’m in the process of helping my D25 sort through colleges with strong physics departments and I am trying to gather two specific pieces of info: whether the college offers nuclear physics courses and what percentage of the physics faculty are women.

Is anyone aware of any functioning A.I. tool that can help with this? So far the AI tools only spit out very general answers, such as listing colleges with highly ranked physics programs. I am hoping there is a way to get an artificial tool to scour the websites for me. Anyone aware of anything?

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I feel like this is more “using computers” rather than “using A.I.” – specifically some sort of web-crawler/data-aggregator.

I’m not aware of anything, but probably anything in the A.I. space is “the wrong tool”.

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Sounds like job for a simple spreadsheet to me :smiley:

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Yes, the spreadsheet will certainly house the information. It is the gathering of it I am hoping to get digital assistance with. Going to every website and tracking down the info is super tedious.

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ChatGPT

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Chatgpt is not a search engine it’s a language learning model…it won’t find female prof % in physics depts or nuclear physics courses on a given school’s website. Only way to do that is search each website, or maybe program/create some type of web scraper.

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Human intelligence is good enough for this job. Put all the possible schools in a big spreadsheet, and start looking at web sites for each school in depth.

Honestly, even though it is time consuming it can also be a nice project to work on collaboratively with your child. In retrospect, I do not regret a moment of the time I spent doing this with my son before he went to college.

As you go through this process, you and your daughter will learn a lot of other things about all the schools, it will help to uncover other things that are important to her, and it will help her to start to gather info for the “Why us?” essays.

In addition to quantitative columns with information of interest to your daughter (like “percentage of physics faculty that are women”), I would suggest having a biggish spreadsheet column for freeform comments on each physics program. After the two of you enter data for a bunch of schools, she may get a sense of additional or different things that she is looking for.

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Love to see what you come up with

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Have you seen this resource, mentioned by American Physical Society?
Welcome - Conference Experience for Undergraduates (CEU) | UW-La Crosse.

Also

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I posted this for another OP interested in physics. Some of the suggestions may be relevant to your daughter as well:

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I was going to say this exact thing, but @tamagotchi said it so well.

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Maybe other top colleges have something similar,

“To combat this underrepresentation, CUWiP was established at the University of Southern California in 2006. In the years since, APS took national ownership of the program and the conference has evolved to provide female-identifying undergraduate physics students with the opportunity to network with successful female physicists, attend panel discussions on life in the industry and plenary talks on cutting-edge research, present poster presentations of their research, and connect with peers from other institutions.”

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