Many students have to juggle a course schedule that fills requirements, caters to interests and avoids conflicts. A team of Cornell students have created a solution: CoursePlan.
According to a statement shared with The Sun by CoursePlan team, which is a part of the Cornell Design Tech Initiative, the app wants to to give students the ability to concretely plan their college career and give them space to grow as their interests change.
On top of providing students with a tool that can sort and schedule classes based on distribution requirements, major requirements and minor requirements, CoursePlan also offers individual course information and reviews from past-students.
These features, according to the CoursePlan team, make the app useful to all students at Cornell, regardless of year, school or major — even if their major or minor is not yet on the app.
Behind CoursePlan is a team of 13 students who have been working on the project for the past four semesters. While the app has been launched, the work of the team has not ended as they work to add more majors and minors.
“We have 20 to 30 majors,” said Will Spencer ’22, “But we’re adding 10 to 15 this week alone because we’ve had such a demand to add more.”
Ein Chang ’22, Product Manager, said that they hope to add most of the requested majors in time for pre-enroll, which starts on May 10. However, she said that this process would not be a simple one because much of the information is hard to come by and must be researched manually by the team members.
Theresa Cho ’22, the app’s Technical Product Manager, said that the way that information about different requirements for the different colleges and departments is presented in a scattered and inconsistent manner— which makes programming the requirements difficult.
Since its launch earlier this month, the app has been tried out by over 1,000 Cornell students.
“I think [CoursePlan] honestly is game changing for me,” said Althea Bata ‘24, who was among the app’s first users.
Ehi Esemuze ‘23, another student who uses the app, described the app as “[a] literal dream come true.”
“Everything corresponds beautifully and you can customize the colors, see course reviews and class descriptions. It’s seriously a must-have for incoming students, I wish I had this when I was coming to Cornell,” Esemuze said.
Another user, Helen Yang ’23, said the app completely altered their scheduling experience at Cornell.
“Before, I had been juggling a mix of paper checklists and spreadsheets and I had like 5 different windows open when picking classes, which was stressful and tedious,” Yang said.
CoursePlan, however, has alleviated much of the stress that has gone into planning her courses.
“It’s great to have such a user-friendly, beautifully designed site where I can visualize everything and even make sure I’m meeting my requirements.”