Aggie Planner

Your AI academic co-pilot for UC Davis

Stop juggling 6 tabs to answer one question: "What should I take next?"


What It Does

Aggie Planner is an all-in-one academic planning platform built for UC Davis students. Upload your transcript and get instant clarity on your entire academic journey.

Feature What You Get
Degree Audit See completed & missing requirements at a glance
AI Academic Advisor Get instant course suggestions and guidance no appointment needed
StudyMate Finder Match with classmates by schedule and interests
Professor Search Discover research opportunities and send AI-powered cold emails

The Problem

UC Davis students juggle degree checklists, Schedule Builder, GE rules, professor directories, and unofficial spreadsheets just to plan one quarter. We built the tool we wished we had.


How We Built It

Frontend Next.js dashboard with clean course planning and professor search views

Backend Node.js + Express API connected to Supabase for live professor, course, and matching data

Data Pipelines Custom Python scrapers for:

  • Engineering major requirements
  • Full course catalog + GE attributes
  • Currently offered classes
  • UC Davis Engineering faculty profiles

Degree Requirement Engine Structured JSON rule system supporting required courses, choose-N units, electives, and major-specific exceptions

Compatibility Scoring AI-powered keyword mapping between undergraduate courses and professor research areas, weighted by grade performance

AI Layer Powered by Gemini 2.5 Flash and Groq for fast, intelligent responses across the academic advisor, cold email drafter, and compatibility scoring features


Challenges We Crushed

  • GE Optimization: UC Davis GEs are unit-based with multi-category overlaps we built an optimizer to count courses in the best possible slots.
  • Messy PDFs Clean Data: Every Engineering major formats requirements differently. We designed a universal structure that handles footnotes, exceptions, and elective variations.
  • Professor Normalization: Scraped and cleaned inconsistent faculty profiles across departments into a unified, searchable format.
  • Compatibility Scoring: Built our own course-to-research keyword dictionary, then weighted matches by grade turning a transcript into a research fit score.

What We're Proud Of

  • Full-stack working product data pipeline, API, and UI all connected
  • Structured requirement data for all UC Davis Engineering majors
  • AI academic advisor for instant guidance no appointment waitlist
  • StudyMate matching by schedule and shared interests
  • Searchable professor database by name, department, and research keyword
  • Personalized compatibility scoring using your coursework + grades
  • AI-powered cold email drafter to help students reach out to professors
  • Built for extensibility future teammates can pick this up and keep building

What We Learned

  • Parsing real university requirement documents into machine-readable logic
  • Designing degree audit systems around edge cases that actually exist
  • Connecting Next.js, Express, Supabase in a clean, scalable way
  • Thinking about course-to-research matching as a recommendation problem

What's Next

  • Expand beyond Engineering to all UC Davis majors
  • Add in-app chat to the StudyMate finder
  • Deeper professor compatibility insights using research paper abstracts
  • Quarter-by-quarter graduation planner with drag-and-drop scheduling

Built at a UC Davis Hackathon by students, for students.

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