SEM:ANTICS

This project was created by community members Faizah Sayyid, Sophia Abolore, Salwa Abdalla, and Majda Lojpur.

Description

Congratulations! You got your first “real” job. But what now?

Entering the workforce is a significant and exciting milestone, but not without its challenges. There is an ever-present pressure on young professionals to fit in and contribute to the company’s success. While newcomers may feel confident about their professionalism, many find it difficult to adjust to the expectations and norms of the workplace, particularly in industries that have a strong corporate culture. Differences in communication styles can create a divide between young professionals and their more seasoned colleagues, harming productivity and team cohesion.

To address this issue, SEM:ANTICS was created. SEM:ANTICS is a tool to improve written communication that creates positive impressions and maintains professional relationships. SEM:ANTICS not only relieves young professionals of the burden of fitting in, but helps them stand out in their new environment. This comprehensive platform allows users to edit emails, store their past emails, and gives advice for students, managers, and employees to effectively learn to communicate to a professional standard.

It gives tooltip recommendations for each email based on a data-set compiled of positive, negative and neutral habits that are used in their writing. Email writers can continually submit email drafts (receiving multiple pieces of feedback) until they complete a certified professional draft. SEM:ANTICS also records all changes after each draft, so after completion, the user can review it at any time and see how they have improved.

Our framework encourages users to:

• Draft their emails to a professional standard
• Reflect on previous drafts and reinforce their learning
• Test themselves using their own old emails and template emails provided

The standard for professionalism that SEM:ANTICS uses is based off of a team-compiled database sourced from various professional blogs about professional email etiquette (e.g., Indeed, Glassdoor, University of Toronto). The front-end is created using React and the back-end is created using Node.js. Analytical and operational data is stored in Firebase. To perform sentiment analysis on users’ emails, Cohere’s classify API was used.