Building An Artificially Intelligent Chatbot

In 2016, Mainstay (formerly AdmitHub) began creating custom college chatbots to provide students with guidance in navigating administrative processes critical to staying enrolled in college. Its very first college chatbot, Pounce, was launched at Georgia State University in April 2016 to help mitigate summer melt—the phenomenon where students fail to show up to their first classes in the fall after committing to attending college. Pounce was able to send students personalized, just-in-time reminders about incomplete enrollment tasks, automatically answer thousands of questions, and escalate concerns to staff members for those who needed extra help.

In order to measure the effectiveness of the product, we implemented the rollout as a randomized controlled trial (RCT) evaluated by researchers Lindsay C. Page and Hunter Gehlbach.

As Director of Partner Success of our then tiny startup, I led Pounce’s content design in collaboration with GSU staff and oversaw its implementation with students. I also worked with our team of engineers to design and enhance the bot’s technical abilities as I closely monitored and evaluated Pounce’s interaction with students throughout the intervention. The positive results of our Georgia State RCT—a 20% reduction in summer melt—were widely publicized in education and mainstream media and noted in education conferences.

This bot would lay the groundwork for the company’s future products. Before leaving Mainstay, I led our product implementation and growth efforts at our first 70 partner institutions, reaching over 1 million students.

While working on this chatbot and the company’s future bots, I drew on my own personal experience as a first-generation American navigating the U.S. admissions process, as well as the experience of the hundreds of students I worked with over the years through my volunteer mentorship work and positions at Harvard Admissions and Laspau. I sought to make a virtual assistant that could help students like me get the help and information needed in an easy-to-access, judgment-free, and joyful way.

For additional information on our Georgia State experience, here are some highlights:

• Published research study How an Artificially Intelligent Virtual Assistant Helps Students Navigate the Road to College by researchers Lindsay C. Page and Hunter Gehlbach

• AdmitHub Georgia State Case Study “Georgia State supports every student with personalized text messaging”

• Harvard Business Review article “How Georgia State University Used an Algorithm to Help Navigate the Road to College”

• NPR’s Hidden Brain podcast “Summer Melt: Why Aren’t Students Showing Up for College?”