PreDents.com: Advanced Member Search now live!

[PDizzle]

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Members do not see this ad.

OK, I was in finals but now I'm not and have finally put in what the peeps wanted most: An Advanced member search in PreDents.com.

For the most part, its intuitive, especially after a few searches because it tells you, in plain english, what you actually searched for. You will get the hang of it (you are all DSchool hopefulls...so you better!!)

It's in Beta, which means it's not bug free (in fact, I know of a few bugs but have not fixed them yet). But Beta also means that it works well enough to use it. If you find a bug, please report it here (Don't email me, cuz I rarely, if ever, read emails from that account) No SDN PM's on bugs or suggestions please. I will monitor this thread until we all get it just right, K??


Some things you may not notice right away:
1) Your last search is saved until you make another one. After a search, go to the home page and you can see what the last search you made was, and seach for it again.
2) Once you get search results, you can sort them by any of the data columns you see(e.g DAT, GPA, State Res, etc)
3) You can click on a search result, view their page, then hit the back button to get back to your search results!...yeah! I fixed that bitch of a problem!


The rest you will pick up while searching. I find it addicting as hell....like you guys need another predental vice!!!!!


Happy hunting...err...searching!

Your everlasting servent...PDizzle

 

[musl85]

awesome job PDizzle. Should be a great help to the next cycle. 👍

 

[Hysteria24]

I think I need to apply again next cycle just for fun so that I could utilize this nifty search tool! Now with the larger database (3 complete cycles), and this search feature, predents.com is invaluable to any predent.

 

[rollypolly]

love it 😀

 

[tamkhan]

looks good.👍

 

[rose786]

Oh my gosh, that is so addicting! Luv u.

 

[eldirty]

looks great! thanks

 

[ColdFish]

I feel like I am asking for more when it is alreay so sweet but any way we could search by undergrad to see how well everyone else in our current class is doing and where they may be going???
Thanks your great

 

[ElectraOnAzalea]

wow! this is fun! you're awesome!👍

 

[PDizzle]

I feel like I am asking for more when it is alreay so sweet but any way we could search by undergrad to see how well everyone else in our current class is doing and where they may be going???
Thanks your great

First off, never feel bad for asking for more features. That's how I add to the site so one day it will be one of the essential predent resources. Right now it's just kinda cool.

To answer your question, unfortunately I can't search by undergrad because everyone entered it in by themselves. For instance, if you went to UC Berkeley, they could have entered, "CAL, UCB, Berkeley, UC Berkeley, etc". For things that people search by I have to have tight control on how they enter data. A possible, but ridiculously arduous task, would be to enter every single undergrad school as an option.....not feasible.

But, keep the ideas coming. Currently, 25% of predents.com voters say they think it's cool but for it to be useful, it needs more features. I am really wondering what more they want so please let me know.

PDizzle

 

[lemoncurry]

how about searching by username?

 

[small]

Nice work! Should be fun.

 

[caloriefree]

Great job!! I have a suggestion. It just crossed my mind and may not be such a good idea but.. how about integration with facebook (if that's possible) so, for those who choose they can link their facebook profiles to make friends from predents.com. Just an idea.

 

[Suren911]

Thank you for this wonderful website!!

 

[PDizzle]

Great job!! I have a suggestion. It just crossed my mind and may not be such a good idea but.. how about integration with facebook (if that's possible) so, for those who choose they can link their facebook profiles to make friends from predents.com. Just an idea.

Thats a good idea but a bit down the road. Predents.com was supposed to be a "one way street" of info and not a community, like SDN. I have a truck load of new stuff to put in but after that, if the peeps want it, I'll put it in.


PShizzle fa rizzle

 

[PDizzle]

how about searching by username?

Done and live. 🙂

You can search for user name, or parts of it or how it starts or ends.

 

[Bruinlove]

How about searching people based on # of interviews that they got, # of acceptances, ratio of acceptances/interviews and ratio of interview/# of schools applied?

 

[Amalgam4U]

The rest you will pick up while searching. I find it addicting as hell....like you guys need another predental vice!!!!!


Happy hunting...err...searching!

Your everlasting servent...PDizzle

you freaking made predents.com?!?!?! you're amazing. really. i'm not kidding.

you know what i was wondering about, though was statistics on waitlists. I'm not sure if this was addressed earlier, but why is there no column on the bottom for waitlist etc? i'm sure it would be interesting to see people who got in off of waitlists etc (especially since I'm on some of them!!!) haha.

well anyways, thanks for the amazing site and taking that initiative to database that stuff. that's really cool. you should accept donations! maybe when i become a dentist and actually have some money i'll hit that up!

 

[PDizzle]

How about searching people based on # of interviews that they got, # of acceptances, ratio of acceptances/interviews and ratio of interview/# of schools applied?

Excellent idea but as it turns out, kinda hard. What I originally wanted to do was to display the # of int, accepts, rejects, and waitlists for all the members of a search result. (just like I display their scores now -- DAT, GPA, etc). It turned out to be way more difficult to do than I figured but that just means it's a challenge and I love those.

Your idea will be in PreDents.com one way or the other.

I have so many cool ideas for auto generated pie charts and graphs it's mind bottling( ....yes, a refrence to "Blades of Glory"!). I got a week and a half til school starts then I'm gonna be MIA cuz of NBDE part I so give me ideas now, or wait til July sometime!

Your humble, unpaid servent...

Pshizzle

 

[PDizzle]

you freaking made predents.com?!?!?! you're amazing. really. i'm not kidding.!

Funny, I tell that to myself 4 or 5 times a day!

you know what i was wondering about, though was statistics on waitlists. I'm not sure if this was addressed earlier, but why is there no column on the bottom for waitlist etc? i'm sure it would be interesting to see people who got in off of waitlists etc (especially since I'm on some of them!!!) haha.
!

I'll put it on the list of things I don't have time for! hehe, j/k. I'll look into it

You should accept donations! maybe when i become a dentist and actually have some money i'll hit that up!

That might actually go into Predents.com pretty damn soon. I am broke as a joke right now. "Check pay phones for change as I pass them" kinda broke!

 

[mss255]

Hey PDizzle -

The site looks great. Thanks for putting the time in to create/maintain it. I know it was very helpful for me during the application cycle and I'm sure I'm not alone.

I did have a bug/improvement to report. When you perform a search by Academic Stats, the inequality functionality doesn't have the logic to suppress zero scores (these are basically nulls). For example, if you search for users with <= 15 on OG, you get a bunch of users that have a score of "0." Obviously, these folks simply didn't report this information. To prevent them appearing in the report, the code should have logic to prevent the search field from containing a null (or zero) value.

Again, I think the site is wonderful.

Best,

 

[golfer]

Is it possible to change your user name?

 

[PDizzle]

Hey PDizzle -

The site looks great. Thanks for putting the time in to create/maintain it. I know it was very helpful for me during the application cycle and I'm sure I'm not alone.

I did have a bug/improvement to report. When you perform a search by Academic Stats, the inequality functionality doesn't have the logic to suppress zero scores (these are basically nulls). For example, if you search for users with <= 15 on OG, you get a bunch of users that have a score of "0." Obviously, these folks simply didn't report this information. To prevent them appearing in the report, the code should have logic to prevent the search field from containing a null (or zero) value.

Again, I think the site is wonderful.

Best,

Bug fixed! I had that feature for GPA but not the DAT scores. Thanks for the tip. 🙂

 

[PDizzle]

Is it possible to change your user name?

Not at this time. Just like you can't change your SDN name (or at least I think you can't)

I really don't see a reason not to put that feature in so I might put it on "the list" but pretty far down.

 

[rose786]

Quit asking for suggestions! People seriously won't stop. Ungrateful I tell you. 😛

 

[Amalgam4U]

That might actually go into Predents.com pretty damn soon. I am broke as a joke right now. "Check pay phones for change as I pass them" kinda broke!

haha. i'm not joking about that though. You should be compensated for all your efforts somehow. Just seems like too good an idea not to pay off...

 

[sarah_bellum]

Interesting stats from the 2008 entering class:

5.2% of applicants had scores >= 20 on all sections of the DAT.

5.8% of applicants had an AA >= 23.

2.0% of applicants had a 4.0 cumulative GPA.

 

[sarah_bellum]

2.1% of applicants were over 30.

1.8% of applicants received at least one acceptance with an AA <= 17.

 

[Wolfram]

in the case when the user checks the "not" box and selects "accepted" , would it be possible to filter withdrawn applications or those whose status was not specifically labelled as rejected. it appears that if a user applied to a school and has either not heard back from them, never updated the status for the school, or withdrew their application, they are included in the 'rejected' list by default, which does not seem technically accurate to me. i don't know if that was coherent enough so lemme give examples.

User "pharoh23" applied to NYU, interviewed at NYU, was neither accepted, rejected, or withdrawn from NYU, but still shows up in the "not, accepted, NYU" search.
User "j151" applied to NYU, interviewed at NYU, but withdrew the NYU application, but still still shows up in the "not, accepted, NYU" search

[don't let my pickiness detract from the appreciation i have for providing us with such an amazing, useful tool! Thank you!]

 

[PDizzle]

in the case when the user checks the "not" box and selects "accepted" , would it be possible to filter withdrawn applications or those whose status was not specifically labelled as rejected. it appears that if a user applied to a school and has either not heard back from them, never updated the status for the school, or withdrew their application, they are included in the 'rejected' list by default, which does not seem technically accurate to me. i don't know if that was coherent enough so lemme give examples.

Well, "not accepted" is not synonymous with "rejected". If you wanted to search for rejected users then select "rejected" from the list. "Not Accepted" is simply anyone who has not recieved an acceptance letter/phone call from a school (or didn't update it). This could be for any number of reasons, some of which you named(eg. withdrawn, school never heard from again, etc)

A possible solution may be to modify the search so you can choose multiple application statuses and their "not" counterpoint. For example, "Everyone who applied, and interviewed but did not get accepted, and did not withdraw, and did not get rejected". This isn't too hard to change program wise but if everyone enters the data correctly, this is not neccessary. The almost same query set could be achieved by either searching for "not accepted" and/or "rejected".

Since this isn't too had to put in (maybe a half day of work), I may change it so you have even more control over the search.

Thanks for the suggestion 🙂

 

[PDizzle]

2.1% of applicants were over 30.

1.8% of applicants received at least one acceptance with an AA <= 17.

LOVE the idea of percentages on searches!! That just made the top of the list! Expect that in about 2 hours!

 

[Wolfram]

Well, "not accepted" is not synonymous with "rejected". If you wanted to search for rejected users then select "rejected" from the list. "Not Accepted" is simply anyone who has not recieved an acceptance letter/phone call from a school (or didn't update it). This could be for any number of reasons, some of which you named(eg. withdrawn, school never heard from again, etc)

A possible solution may be to modify the search so you can choose multiple application statuses and their "not" counterpoint. For example, "Everyone who applied, and interviewed but did not get accepted, and did not withdraw, and did not get rejected". This isn't too hard to change program wise but if everyone enters the data correctly, this is not neccessary. The almost same query set could be achieved by either searching for "not accepted" and/or "rejected".

Since this isn't too had to put in (maybe a half day of work), I may change it so you have even more control over the search.

Thanks for the suggestion 🙂

you know, it didn't occur to me to use 'rejected'. i started playing with 'accepted' and then noticed the 'not' box and well,... my bad. our canadian brains are just coming out of a deep freeze 😛

how you have it set up now is elegantly simple and effective 👍

 

[PDizzle]

I've done MAJOR changes to the internal structure of the database so if you see something funny, let me know. I tried to go over the whole site but I'm sure a bug or two still remains.

The changes allowed me to do some cool things. For one, on all search results the numbers of apps, interviews, acceptances, rejections, withdraws and waitlists are displayed. Unfortunately you cant sort your search set by these things(like you can GPA) for reasons you don't really need to know.

....But, for those that are curious,

<geek talk> I had to make two separate ,nested, sequential queries and you can't sort the first result set by the second result set. The reason for 2 queries was because the first search result often did not have ALL applications(due to user selected filters) so I couldn't do a "Count(expr)" and get the true number of apps, interviews, etc</geek talk>

Other things I put in were %'s for all search sets plus fixed a few bugs.

 

[chevyiiguy]

I love the new search options! I was updating my record today and every school I updated shows up in the interviewed, accepted, rejected and withdrawn lists even if I didn't fill in that box. Thanks for the great site! It's very informative.

 

[PDizzle]

I love the new search options! I was updating my record today and every school I updated shows up in the interviewed, accepted, rejected and withdrawn lists even if I didn't fill in that box. Thanks for the great site! It's very informative.

You went to the site while I was making the above mentioned major changes. It's back to normal now 🙂

 

[jigabodo]

This is not fair!

How come I didn't have that when I applied?

🙁🙁

 

[PDizzle]

This is not fair!

How come I didn't have that when I applied?

🙁🙁

All I had was constantly broken "Official Interview" threads and every third post to every single thread being "What are your stats"!

 

[PDizzle]

*BUMP* for more feedback

 

[CMistry]

Kinda off-topic, kinda not...

I tried to update my Pitt status to "Waitlisted" for this cycle. When I did that, all the fields went crazy for Pitt... there were "0"s in every category (accepted, rejected, withdrawn) with no dates. I couldn't edit any of the fields (it wouldn't let me delete the "0"s!). So I deleted Pitt, and now I can't re-add it. I don't really care about it for myself, just trying to enter all my data so it is accurate for future applicants. What's going on?

-Cyrus

 

[PDizzle]

Kinda off-topic, kinda not...

I tried to update my Pitt status to "Waitlisted" for this cycle. When I did that, all the fields went crazy for Pitt... there were "0"s in every category (accepted, rejected, withdrawn) with no dates. I couldn't edit any of the fields (it wouldn't let me delete the "0"s!). So I deleted Pitt, and now I can't re-add it. I don't really care about it for myself, just trying to enter all my data so it is accurate for future applicants. What's going on?

-Cyrus

Very much ON topic.

I had to make major database structure changes that had a ripple effect throughout the website. Everything was get'n whacky and not working. I solved most of it. The "all 0's" thing has been fixed. You should be able to add a school now and update it with no problems.

Thanks for the bug report. 🙂

 

[CMistry]

Very much ON topic.

I had to make major database structure changes that had a ripple effect throughout the website. Everything was get'n whacky and not working. I solved most of it. The "all 0's" thing has been fixed. You should be able to add a school now and update it with no problems.

Thanks for the bug report. 🙂

I updated and everything looks great. Thanks for making such a kick-@ss site! When you open up for donations let me know!!

 

[burton117]

Outstanding update!! Once again, you've outdone yourself!

In terms of suggestions, I'm also a big fan of showing schools wait listed at on the individual profile.

Thanks again!

 

[PDizzle]

Outstanding update!! Once again, you've outdone yourself!

In terms of suggestions, I'm also a big fan of showing schools wait listed at on the individual profile.

Thanks again!

Not a problem, expect that by this weekend!


Your everlasting web slave,

PDizzle

 

[ColdFish]

With the new thread about where applicants went to undergrad it might be easier to put the list into predents and then that could allow for a search.

 

[PDizzle]

With the new thread about where applicants went to undergrad it might be easier to put the list into predents and then that could allow for a search.

Good idea but unfortunately you can't accurately search by undergrad becuase its a free-form field and people type in their schools differently. For example, if someone went to UC Berkeley they could have typed in any of these: UCB, Berkeley, UC Berkeley, University of California at Berkeley, etc.

Thx forthe idea tho 🙂