Building Your Plan
Planning gives you a drag-and-drop space to map a complete path to your degree, from start to finish. You can use Planning on your mobile phone and with accessibility tools housed in your browser, but there is no separate phone app.
Getting access — Log into your plan using your regular system credentials provided by your institution. If you have problems, contact your IT help desk. No app installation or specific browser is needed, apart from what your institution may require you to use.
Tip
As soon as you log in, you see your Primary Plan (with a solid yellow star ⭐), which will display if your advisor already created it for you. To get to other plans, use the Back to all plans link or the Switch Plan drop-down menu:
Creating Plans
There are three ways to get a plan:
- Start with the predefined template for a specific degree path offered by your institution (this is shared with you by advisors)
- Make a copy of your existing plan (to compare your options), giving it a name that is unique among your plans
- Create one from scratch, adding every term and course manually
Autosave — You don’t see Save buttons because Planning automatically updates the state of your plan as you add, move, and delete items. Click on a name to rename it, and your changes are saved as soon as you click away from it. Because saving works this way, if you want to try out a lot of changes without losing the original, be sure to use the Copy command for the plan and experiment on the copy.
Primary Plan — You have one and only one plan that is active (primary), and that plan will always appear first, with a star ⭐ by its name. If you created just one plan, it’s your primary; if you have several plans, you can activate another plan by clicking Star by its name. You don’t need to do anything to share it with your advisor: any change like this is shared automatically and visible immediately. When making copies of your primary plan, remember to rename them to communicate their purpose for you and your advisor.
Sample Workflow
Lisa’s primary plan is a Biology B.S. She’s drawn to quantitative biology and realizes she’d need so much math that she might as well earn a minor or double major in it. She makes two copies of her primary plan, naming them for clarity (“Bio, Math minor” and “Bio/Math double major”), to review the coursework of each one and how it affects her plans for graduate school. After reviewing them with her advisor and talking to faculty members, she decides to go for the Math minor. On “Bio, Math minor”, she clicks its star ⭐, which shows the tip “Make primary plan“. She’s now on the new plan, which then moved to the first position on her plans page.
Non-Course Items
Because your academic plan needs to sequence all your activities between now and graduation, it also lets you add all kinds of non-course items:
- Internships
- Study abroad opportunities
- Involvement in student organizations or volunteer programs
- Deadlines such as applying for a minor or graduation
- Research experiences and programs
When you need to add anything that isn’t part of your course catalog, just type it in as custom text and click Add. This can help inform your advisor as to other commitments you plan to take on during your program of study.
Placeholders — Non-course items can also be placeholders for course decisions that you still need to make. A common example is a general education requirement in which there are several course options available that would satisfy it. You can identify placeholders by the gold highlight on the left edge of the item. Once you make that selection, the non-course item is replaced by the course that you chose from the catalog.
Sample Workflow
On her plan, Genji sees a placeholder for her language requirement. She opens it and reads that the requirement for 2 years of a foreign language must be Chinese, French, German, or Spanish. Because her high school credits were in Russian, Lisa selects Course Search (magnifying glass icon) from the left menu and researches what’s available at her campus. With her mind made up, she opens the placeholder and clicks the Add a Course box, where she types in “fr” to look up the French course she needs. Once she adds it, the placeholder is replaced by her French course.
Details: Requirements, Changes
The View Details button opens a scrollable pane with tabs. On a laptop, you can work on the plan with its Details open; on a phone, you must close the Details pane to get back to your plan. These tabs hold the supporting information you need for the current plan you have open:
Requirements — The Requirements tab shows your progress toward completion of the degree you are targeting; you can hide completed items to focus only on what you have left to do. What appears here is set by your institution’s auditing system and by your own official records of coursework and transfers.
Change Log — Each change to your plan, including becoming primary and being shared with a new person, is recorded in the Change Log tab. The log captures who changed what on the current plan, and when. Keep in mind that a copied plan only tracks changes and comments from the moment you copied it.
Sample Workflow
For his English degree, Akil sees a placeholder for a Comparative Literature course. Because his professor mentioned that this year’s catalog had some changes, he wants to make sure to pick one that accurately satisfies the latest degree requirements. On his plan, he selects View Details and opens the Requirements tab. He enables Hide Completed Requirements to shorten the list, then he scrolls down to the “English BA” requirements, finds “Comparative Lit”, and expands the list of Courses Available: only 3 are listed. He uses Course Search to decide among those 3 options.
Comments
Each term holds its own comments. Select the term’s 3-dot menu to get to Add Comment. The comments attached below each term help record the questions, replies, and reminders between you and your advisors. Comments appear newest to oldest, so you can figure out who said what, and when. Everyone that shares your plan can see all of the comments by all parties.
Important
New comments do not trigger email notifications, so be sure to reach out to your advisor if you need something now.
Sample Workflow
Lisa is building out her “Bio/Math double major” prospective plan, and she has questions about testing out of prereqs, to help her graduate as quickly as possible. In the upcoming term, she selects the 3-dot menu and selects Add Comment. There she asks about how to go about testing out and what the downsides might be. When her advisor opens her plan, he sees a notification that there’s a new comment, and he opens it to answer her. On the ride back home, she accesses her plan on her phone and replies back. Because the conversation is stored within the plan, the reasoning behind her decisions will be there for future reference.
Editing and Deleting
Life happens, plans change, and sections fill up, so Planning makes it easy for you to drag courses into other terms as your plan evolves.
Your cursor will change to guide you:
- When the cursor is a hand ✋, you can drag the item to another location. This is the same as opening the course details and choosing a new Term from the drop-down list.
- To get rid of an item, click it to open its details and select Delete.
- When the cursor is a blinking vertical bar, you can start typing to trigger a lookup.
Deleting a plan — Because you cannot recover a deleted plan or term, extra protections exist: you cannot delete a plan or term without confirming your choice, and you cannot delete a primary (starred) plan until you make another one primary (clicking the star ⭐ for Start).
There is no undo. Use caution when deleting courses, terms, and plans. Check the Change Log to see what courses you might have deleted in error and need to add back. If your latest change does not appear, close and reopen the log.
Best practice
Don’t delete an original plan if there is any chance that you might need its history of Change Logs and comments; these do not carry forward when you Copy a plan. If you don’t need the comments, choose to Clear a plan (the refresh icon): “clearing” a plan empties out all terms and courses but keeps the plan and change log intact.