Disciplines and Majors database and site launched
A frequent request of prospective students and many across the campus was to have a centralized source of all disciplines and majors available for students at Vanderbilt. Rather than start from scratch, we approached the Vanderbilt Institutional Research Group (VIRG) to see if we could collaborate with them on creating such a tool.
VIRG already maintains the official record of all disciplines and majors available – but it wasn’t in a searchable format, or designed for a student who is looking for a program of study.
We were able to take an initial export of their data, reformat it to work for what we needed, dump it into a mysql database, and then build out the front and backends using our oh-so-handy friend, php.
From a user perspective, students can sort majors by discipline, by type of degree, and by school. They can also search by keyword. (This portion of the data is still being populated – each degree is being tagged with keywords to further help the user find exactly what they’re looking for.)
The backend is maintained by VIRG through an easy to use interface that allows them to add, remove and categorize degrees using a simple form.
Special thanks to Mary Lucus in VIRG who has been instrumental in getting this project off the ground. This project was a great example of two departments working together on a project that we BOTH really wanted to happen!
If you have suggestions on how we might make this tool better, please contact us!