A roadmap to a graduate program advisor search engine

Each year thousands of students for gradute programs in the US universities. Before applying for a prospecting graduate student should go throgh a tedious task of looking at each program faculty members to make a sure a program have faculty members which work on their research interests. Most of the time prospecting gradute students should contact a faculty member before application to get communicate with them and get a higher chance of application approval. Going through each program website and read the information is really a time consuming act.

making a search engine for graduate students to find advisors all around a country (Here I worked on Physics graduate programs in the US) based on their research interests and other factors is necessary. The graduate students can testify that the graduate education experience depends greatly on the advisor. The current search engines like petersons are more university-oriented rather than focusing on searching for the right prospecting advisor in a graduate program.

At this GitHub repository, I provide the code to the prototype of a graduate advisor search engine. This search engine is based on the database constructed with the methods described here. Using this search engine one can search the research interest of over 6200 faculty members from around 150 graduate programs. The search query and the information of each faculty member are vectorized using the Tfidf model and then the people with the most vector similarity to the query vector are recommended to the user.

This code is extendable to any graduate programs other than Physics programs. However for other majors the database of the faculty members information should be constructed.