College Redi

College Redi helps students tracks degree progress, courses, registration, deadlines, and administrative tasks, while monitoring school email for important actions using AI for inbox parsing.

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Inspiration

Redi was inspired by my family. One of my sons is currently in college, and another recently graduated. Watching both of them navigate college showed me that academic success is only part of the challenge. Students also have to manage registration dates, degree requirements, important emails, forms, and deadlines, often across several disconnected systems.

The goal is simple: give a student one dependable place to see what needs attention, what comes next, and how close they are to graduation.

What it does

Redi can model degree requirements, track completed and planned courses, estimate graduation progress, and monitor registration status. It can also connect to a college inbox through read-only IMAP, use AI to identify important messages and deadlines, and turn those details into clear summaries and actionable tasks.

How I built it

I built Redi (alongside gpt-5.6-sol) as a self-hosted web application using Next.js, React, and TypeScript, with MongrelDB providing encrypted storage. It combines degree planning, registration tracking, administrative reminders, and college-email monitoring in one place. Security and privacy were part of the design from the beginning, including encrypted secrets, protected sessions, limited email access, and careful handling of student data.

Challenges I ran into

One of the biggest challenges was turning information from different sources into something consistent and useful. Degree audits, course plans, emails, and administrative requirements rarely follow one standard format. Important details can be buried in long messages, change over time, or depend on context.

Another slightly time consuming piece was getting the AI responses to work multi-turn via the chat box, while providing the tool calls and functionalities students would expect it to be capable of. After a few hours of debugging I had it working quite well!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Building something out that other people might be able to put to use and help them stay on track. The experience of supporting one son through college and watching another complete the journey kept the project grounded. The idea for Redi came from challenges our family could relate to, and it was built to help other students and families feel more organized, informed, and prepared.

What I learned

Iterate, iterate, iterate. I had a spec doc that I turned into an implementation doc, and I used gpt-5.6-sol to iterate through it countless times. Constantly having it run subagents to check and confirm the functionality met the original spec uncovered many instances of things being overlooked but ultimately fixed as the iterations went on.

What's next for College Redi

Who knows? Maybe people will bring their own ideas to the table and support some PRs!

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