Kitsu | Devpost

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Inspiration

Everyone has a story to tell, but not everyone is a good storyteller. Every year, millions of high school students in the United States alone take on an important crucible with life-changing implications as they apply to college. The application journey is tough for prospective college students seeking a quality education, with college application essays being a crucial step many applicants struggle with. At the same time, the private college admissions consulting industry contributes to massive inequity within higher education, especially since many students cannot afford the high price tag of hiring a private counselor to guide them through the essay-writing process. Furthermore, many high schools are unable to provide students with the individualized attention they need during the college application process, especially when it comes to crafting, revising, and perfecting multiple essays for multiple schools.

As college students who went through the process ourselves and have friends and family members struggling with the very same process we went through, we wanted to developed an accessible, supportive, personable way for students to get the help they need with crafting their college admissions essays so they can tell their story in the best way possible.

What it does

Introducing Kitsu, a friendly companion who’s here to help countless students tell their story in the best way possible (amongst many other things we’ll get to in just a moment)! Upon arriving at Kitsu’s front page, you’ll immediately be greeted by a cute fox companion ready to help you craft the perfect admissions essay based on your unique experiences! Our logo with the double colons refers to the analogy symbolism operator in logic and mathematics. It symbolizes our goal that Kitsu will help students make connections between what they want to say and what goes into their admission essays!

Kitsu utilizes state-of-the-art large language models to provide step-by-step assistance through the college essay writing process while remaining extremely affordable. Kitsu does not generate or make up essays - rather it encourages the student to dive deeper through conversation. Kitsu’s process starts with an ideation phase where the student is prompted to write a short paragraph regarding an interesting experience they’ve had. Optionally, students can also input a specific essay prompt before Kitsu asks for the first paragraph. Our ideation model will then pose tailored questions to the student to gather more details and encourage deeper answers. Possible questions include ones on emotions the student was feeling at the time, what they learned from their experience, and how they grew along the way. Once the student has answered enough questions, they can proceed to the drafting phase. Kitsu will gather their inputs and combine them to create a cohesive draft for their college essay!

But what are the advantages of a virtual college essay counselor like Kitsu aside from drastically increasing accessibility and reducing inequity?

Trust. The virtual aspect of Kitsu allows students to feel more comfortable when they seek help for their college admissions essays. Students with sensitive stories to tell may not want to enlist a help of a human guidance counselor because they value their privacy. Kitsu does not collect or save user input data and will never criticize or judge the applicant as humans might. Students using Kitsu can feel at ease knowing that their story will only be accessible between them and the admissions officer who reads it. Kitsu is also more patient than any human counselor we know!

Relatability. Kitsu features a cute and knowledgeable fox which guides the user through the essay-writing process. Using an animated avatar provides the user with a relatable animal to guide them along their essay-writing journey, providing positive encouragement at every turn. We intend to expand our avatar selection to include other fully-customizable animals and humans so students can pick the race, gender, etc. which they relate to the most.

Encouraging. Kitsu aims to provide positive reinforcement and encouragement at every stage and step of the way in the essay writing process. Students will receive positive comments and feedback so they can feel supported, welcomed, and inspired. Kitsu will also celebrate the applicant’s accomplishments, making them feel that their story matters and ensuring that they know their value. Students will have a higher self esteem as Kitsu helps open new doors for them.

Fun! Fun usually isn’t a word associated with the college application process, but we aim to gamify the essay writing stage with Kitsu! Students who use Kitsu will find the essay writing process to feel more like a conversation with a companion as they chat with their animal guide, answering meaningful questions and receiving positive encouragement.

How we built it

Key technologies we used include React, Express.js, and Node.js alongside Cohere's amazing NLP platform and API for our language modeling. We compiled and wrote our own dataset by writing our own college essays based off of real-life ones from various online sources. We also experimented with and finetuned models using OpenAI's GPT-3 language model in combination with Weights & Biases, a popular MLOps platform. For finetuning and hyperparameter tuning, we started off using Google Colab before switching to a Google Cloud Platform compute instance with a V100 GPU for faster results. For UI/UX, we used Figma for prototyping.

Challenges we ran into

Since we were working with some technologies that were new to us, it took us longer than expected to finish our MVP and we did not finish integrating our Figma UI/UX with our React application. The dataset creation stage was also extremely time-consuming as we couldn't find a large repository of existing college essays and wanted to avoid possible copyright issues by using a variety of essays we wrote in-house. The spotty internet connection also posed a challenge for us and in one scenario, it took us over 30 minutes to install package dependencies for our web application. The internet connection also results in our web application being very slow as it needs to fetch data from the Cohere and GPT-3 APIs.

Accomplishments that we're proud of and what we learned

We are a trio of bears consisting of a full-stack software engineer, deep learning researcher, and UI/UX designer. Amongst the three of us, two of us are first-time hackers! All of us experimented with, learned, and integrated new technologies over the course of the hackathon. Our UI/UX designer learned how to use Figma and developed every single asset of our UI/UX from scratch. Our full-stack software developer and deep learning researcher learned how to use Cohere's platform and worked with our UI/UX designer to integrate the trained language models in a functional web application through React (which we also learned over the course of the event). Together, we were able to bring our different experiences and insights with technology, DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion), human-centered design, and the college application process (like most others in this hackathon, we were once high school students as well ;-) to develop a project we are truly proud of. We would also like to thank the Cal Hacks mentors and sponsors for providing us with endless support and advice throughout the development process. We couldn’t be more grateful to them!

What's next for Kitsu

We believe that our platform has great commercial potential as a startup aiming to disrupt the $1.9 billion private college admission consulting machine. Having consulted and pitched our idea to members of the Berkeley startup, DEI, and EdTech spaces, we received great feedback and a lot of interest in seeing Kitsu come to life! After building on our MVP at Cal Hacks, we intend to refine our platform and turn our hackathon project into a fully-fledged startup over the next few months. Licensing our platform to high schools would provide an affordable way for their students to receive help with their admissions essays while taking stress off of overwhelmed high school counselors. Students can also buy a monthly subscription for the price of a sandwich, giving them full access to an intelligent guide for their admissions essays at a mere fraction of the cost of hiring a private counselor. We also want to continue to support our original goal of accessibility as much as we can. For the students who cannot afford our platform, we intend to offer complimentary use of Kitsu.

Additional features aside from customizable avatars that we will add in the future include our hook crafting, refinement, and grammar-checking models. Having built part of our initial application and integrated two functional models, we believe that these models will not be difficult to implement. We also want to add additional accessibility features including text-to-speech (ASR) and support for different languages. Finally, we would like to add the option craft essays with specified minimum and maximum word limits. We have already tested this unreleased feature through an unintegrated version of our essay drafting model and it works perfectly.