.jpg)
myplanBYU — Degree Optimizer
Students miss scholarships and study abroads they never knew existed. I built the tool I wanted as a freshman: type your major, get a real semester-by-semester plan, and see everything that fits it. Classmates ask me for the link still.
- 175 majors
- live catalog
- real users
01 · The problem I actually had
Planning my own path through BYU meant MAP sheets, prerequisite chains and GE boxes spread across PDFs that don't talk to each other. That part was just annoying. What bothered me more was everything students never hear about: scholarships with three applicants, study abroads that fit their major exactly, test-out exams. You can't ask about something you don't know exists.
So I built the tool I wanted as a freshman.
02 · What it is
Type in your major, or two majors and a minor, and it builds a semester-by-semester plan that respects every prerequisite, every season a course is offered, and BYU's own credit rules. Import your transcript and it starts where you are. Then the part I care about most: it reads your plan and shows the scholarships, study abroads and clubs that fit it. An AI advisor sits on the same data for the questions a form can't anticipate.
03 · Challenges
Almost everything, eventually. BYU's MAP sheets and its catalog disagree more often than you'd hope, so the solver had to learn a rule nobody writes down: the sheet advisors hand out wins, and the conflict surfaces as a warning instead of a silent reshuffle. The data refreshes itself weekly through a scraper that throws out its own bad output before it deploys.
Testing it took two nets: benchmark data for the mechanical failures, and a small site I built to read the AI's answers myself, because whether advice is any good isn't something a regex can tell you.
04 · Real people
People still ask me for the link, which feels strange to say. I've recorded over 2,000 server requests so far, and the feedback form keeps turning up real problems: a GE that should double-count, a course the plan quietly dropped. Most became same-week fixes, and it's still evolving with feedback. Somewhere in there it stopped being a project.
05 · Where it's going
I'm talking with people at BYU about whether the university could use it, or at least its ideas. Either way it keeps getting better, because the feedback keeps coming.