SmoothTransfer: Plan Your Transfer, Stress Less After
SmoothTransfer is a suggestion tool. It cannot replace your counselor. Use it to understand your options and walk into a counselor meeting prepared, then confirm your plan with them.
Inspiration
I am a community college transfer student myself, and I built SmoothTransfer from something that happened to me.
When I applied to transfer, I did not realize that some universities would not accept my AP Physics credit the way I expected. That included UCLA and one of my safety schools. I found out too late. My last two quarters became 22 units each, while I worked full time. It was one of the hardest stretches of my education, and most of that stress could have been avoided if I had known months earlier.
About one in three students at the UCs and CSUs are transfer students, so this is not a rare problem. Counselors are often overwhelmed, appointments are hard to get, and many students, especially first-generation students like me, end up piecing things together alone from university websites and articulation agreements. Every university and major has different rules. AP and IB credit is accepted differently from school to school. One missed requirement can mean extra classes, extra money, or a delayed transfer.
I wanted to build the tool I wish I had when I started.
What it does
SmoothTransfer turns a student's college, target university and major into a clear, checked, term-by-term transfer plan, and keeps that plan useful when life changes.
- Pick any pair. Choose a California community college, a UC or CSU campus and a major. The menus come from ASSIST's own list of institutions, and the app works for both quarter and semester colleges.
- Live requirements. The app loads the real ASSIST agreement and shows which college course covers each university course, including "pick N" rules and courses with no equivalent.
- One academic record. Upload a transcript PDF, type courses in by hand, and add AP and IB exam credit. Everything is saved so students can come back without starting over.
- A plan you can see and move. Each term shows its units, the running total, and about how many hours a week it takes. Students can drag a course to another term to try a different order.
- Options when life happens. If a student fails a class or takes a new job, the app does not give one order. It lays out choices, such as cutting work hours, adding a summer term, or moving the goal term, and the student picks.
- General education from the college's own list. Cal-GETC areas use each college's official course list from ASSIST. Courses from the transcript and AP/IB exams are placed for the student, and Claude can suggest one approved course for each open area.
How I built it
SmoothTransfer is a Python and Streamlit app with a local SQLite database.
Bright Data. ASSIST gives out its data only through a token the site creates when its page loads, so plain requests fail. I use Bright Data's Browser API to open the real public ASSIST pages and capture the data those pages request. This covers majors, agreements, the list of institutions and each college's Cal-GETC list. Everything is live, public and read without logging in, and nothing is mocked.
Claude plans, Python checks. Claude orders the courses, balances each term around the student's unit limits, work hours and goal term, explains the plan, and offers options when something changes. Plain Python then checks it before the student sees it:
- every course must be in the agreement
- no course is repeated
- no term is over the unit limit
- every requirement is met, including "pick N" rules
- Cal-GETC suggestions must be on that area's official list and cannot be used twice
A plan that fails the check goes back to Claude to be fixed. Claude also reads AP and IB credit charts, and every rule is checked against the chart's own text before it is applied.
Student review. Transcripts are read with rules first and Claude only as a fallback. Extracted courses are shown for review before they are saved.
Challenges I faced
- ASSIST fights scripts. The first calls to ASSIST's API returned "400 Bad Request." The fix was to stop calling it by hand and let ASSIST's own page make the request, then capture the response.
- Every college and university looks a little different. Something that worked for my own college failed on another. ASSIST's Cal-GETC list used different field names, some agreements had sections laid out differently, and quarter and semester colleges need different terms and unit rules. I made the parser tolerant, and when it cannot read part of an agreement, the app now says so instead of crashing or hiding it.
- Slow responses. The remote browser sometimes stalls once and works the next time, so fetches are retried, and anything already loaded is cached.
- Keeping AI honest. A language model can be confidently wrong about course rules. Every plan and every suggestion goes through code that knows the real data.
- Showing a lot of information in a small space. I spent a lot of time making the quarter-by-quarter board compact, with units, running totals and weekly hours on each row.
What I learned
AI is most useful when it is paired with structured data, explicit checks and human review, not when it makes confident guesses about complicated policy. I also learned that the transfer process is not just a scheduling problem. It is an information-access problem. Students should not discover a missing requirement or an unaccepted credit in their final quarters, when their options are limited.
What's next
- Week-by-week study planning. Students upload syllabi, class materials and their transcript, and say which hours they have free. Claude then builds a weekly plan for every quarter, and code checks that it fits their hours and deadlines.
- Fuller checks of UC and CSU transferability, more AP and IB charts, and more transcript formats.
- More testing with real community college students. My impact plan is to share the tool with community college students and ask what helped and what confused them.
I cannot remove every complication from transferring. But students should be able to plan their transfer before it becomes an emergency.
Plan Your Transfer, Stress Less After.
SmoothTransfer is a planning aid, not an official evaluation. The full list of what it checks and what it does not is in LIMITATIONS.md.## Inspiration
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