Problem / Background
USC offers hundreds of sustainability-related courses, but information was scattered across departmental websites, PDFs, and internal systems. Students who wanted to build an interdisciplinary path in sustainability had no single place to search, filter, and compare offerings. The USC President’s Office wanted a centralized tool that made these courses visible and easy to explore.
Vision / Goals
The vision was to create a simple, student-friendly dashboard that:
- Aggregates sustainability-related courses from across the university into one interface.
- Maps each course to relevant UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
- Supports search and filtering by topic, department, level, and SDG.
- Can be maintained and extended by USC teams after handoff.
The outcome needed to feel intuitive for students while being robust enough to support future sustainability initiatives.
My Role & Team
I served as the sole product lead, designer, and engineer on this project. My responsibilities included:
- Defining the product scope, milestones, and delivery timeline with the President’s Office.
- Designing the UX and interaction model for the dashboard.
- Building the data pipeline, course classification logic, and front-end experience.
- Collaborating with university stakeholders to secure data access and align on requirements.
- Documenting the system and handing it off cleanly to another developer for ongoing maintenance.
Execution (Product + Tech)
The project combined data engineering, NLP, and rapid dashboard development.
Data Pipeline
- Web-scraped course descriptions from multiple departmental and program sites.
- Used Python scripts to clean, normalize, and merge scraped data with historical course offerings from USC’s internal database.
- Designed and implemented a lightweight NER-based mapping from course descriptions to UN SDGs.
- Stored processed data in a structured SQL format to support fast querying and filtering.
Dashboard & UX
- Built the interactive dashboard in RShiny, focusing on clarity and ease of use for students.
- Implemented search, SDG filters, department filters, and course detail views.
- Iterated on layout and copy based on feedback from administrators and student testers.
Delivery & Handoff
- Managed the GitHub repo and deployment process.
- Created clear technical documentation covering data sources, pipelines, and how to update or extend the tool.
- Onboarded a follow-on developer and handed over ownership to USC teams.
Results / Impact
The Sustainability Course Finder became USC’s first centralized discovery tool for sustainability-related curriculum and was publicly launched and featured on USC Today. It made it significantly easier for students to:
- Find sustainability courses outside their home department.