Update 6/20/22

Today I really didn't accomplish much. I thought that pulling out all of the colleges from the College Express lists would take me an hour, but it ended up taking almost all day. Part of the reason why was that I didn't realize the lists in html form took so many different forms. Some of them had colleges and their names as links, others had numbers, others had colleges and no links. It took quite a bit of work to realize and fix these cases. Maybe I even missed some. After all, there is no guarantee the college names are uniform. I noticed that some state schools with various locations (like University of Alabama at Birmingham vs University of Alabama, Birmingham) had different name formats. I fixed this case, but maybe others are like that. Another complication was that randomly in the evening, my source code for the list parsing was overriden with something. For a few minutes I panicked, thinking I had lost the entire day's work. I didn't have a backup of it on GitLab, as it was made today. But, I had the compiled binary of the code, and there was a decompiler I found on the internet that worked. I probably should contribute some lines of code to that project [2] in appreciation. I still have some big parts to do, like integrating the IPEDS data and making it intractable. I think this latter part will be especially hard, because I have to figure out a way to organize and value the colleges based on criteria.I did try and start making it on Heroku, but I realized that web hosting was far over my head as I would need to learn css/html, Java networking, and how to get it to work with Heroku. I think I'm just going to put it on Replit. I plan on asking a friend for a time estimate for me to do the web app, and if it is too high I'll just go with the Replit route. I also found this [1] all-expenses-covered fly-in program for Swarthmore, one of my top colleges. But, it is due on July 7th, so I think I need to finish it this week. There is a lot of stuff I have to finish up this week though: I want to get a rough draft of my personal statement for the Common App done, some random projects, prove a conjecture/internet theorem I have, college search project, and now the Swarthmore stuff. I also still need to pay for ACC classes, but the instructor hasn't been revealed yet.

[1] https://www.swarthmore.edu/admissions-aid/discover-swarthmore-fly-program
[2] https://github.com/mstrobel/procyon