SMARTNEXUS – One Platform for Every Campus Stakeholder: From Discovery to Administration

Abstract

SMARTNEXUS is a unified web-based college ecosystem platform designed to support students and campus stakeholders throughout the complete student lifecycle. The platform addresses the fragmentation of college information across multiple websites, admission portals, and campus management systems by integrating college discovery, admission decision-making, and post-admission campus engagement within a single digital environment. Before admission, SMARTNEXUS enables students to search and compare colleges, analyse historical cutoff data, receive personalized recommendations through transparent multi-criteria scoring, verify college information, and organize admission preferences using an intelligent option form builder. After admission, the platform provides a centralized student dashboard offering access to academic information, announcements, events, clubs, feedback mechanisms, and issue and complaint tracking. The proposed system utilizes free and open-source technologies, including React, Vite, Python, FastAPI, PostgreSQL, Pandas, NumPy, and scikit-learn. Its recommendation engine employs a transparent scoring model that combines eligibility, historical cutoff matching, branch preference, location suitability, fee alignment, and college quality indicators. The platform follows a layered architecture comprising presentation, application, data, and analytics services. Existing research primarily addresses either college recommendation or campus utility management, whereas SMARTNEXUS integrates both functionalities into a unified student lifecycle architecture. This paper presents the system design, recommendation methodology, functional modules, implementation approach, and evaluation framework for developing an integrated and student-centric digital campus ecosystem.

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