Data Science at the InfoCenter: Study counseling closely scrutinized
29 June, 2023
Student analyzed correspondence with applicants and provided clues for optimization.
Kasaee Roodsari Kaveh, a student in the Master’s degree program Data Science, wrote his master’s thesis on “Optimization of the inquiry procedure at the University of Applied Sciences Technikum Wien” in the summer semester of 2023. The basis were 4,067 emails, which were sent to studienberatung@technikum-wien.at or answered by the InfoCenter in the years 2019-2021.
In the Wordcloud he created, you can see that the most frequently asked questions concern registration, application and the placement test:
Here are some of the most important results:
- Prospective students who send e-mail inquiries to the InfoCenter do not need a long thread of patience, because inquiries are answered within an average of only 10 hours.
- The most frequent inquiries come from Austria, followed by Germany. In third place for the above period is Iran, followed by Turkey.
Based on the data, Mr. Kasaee Roodsari created an application specifically usable for the InfoCenter, which should generate a suitable answer by simply inserting an anonymized e-mail received.
However, when the InfoCenter conducted tests with tools such as ChatGPT, Curie and TextdaVinci, the conclusion was that queries could not (yet) be answered “automatically” with these tools, because the systems access outdated data (2019-2021) and the effort for correction would be higher than answering the emails with their own text modules.
Nonetheless, much of the content from the “Application/Registration” section was used as an opportunity to present information more transparently on the website. A click-through page with choices – starting with the type of one’s training document – is currently underway and will be completed by the time applications open on September 15, 2023.
The InfoCenter team would like to thank Mr. Kasaee Roodsari Kaveh for the valuable evaluation and uncomplicated handling, as well as study program director David Meyer for the idea. As sensitive data was worked with here, Mr. Kasaee Roodsari Kaveh had to sign a confidentiality agreement. The tests were conducted without disclosing personal details.