How to Plan Your Degree

Every degree has four buckets of requirements: general education, your major, your minor or concentration if you have one, and the total credit and residency rules your school requires for any degree. Before you plan a single semester, pull the catalog for your catalog year and list every requirement in each bucket.

Use your catalog year, not the current one. Your requirements are locked at the year you entered. A newer catalog may look easier or harder, but it does not apply to you unless you officially opt in.

Most of the hardest planning problems come from prerequisite chains. A 400-level course might require a 300-level course, which requires a 200-level course, which requires placement or a specific first-year course. If the chain is four deep, you need four semesters of runway.

Write out every prerequisite chain in your major before you schedule anything. The longest chain sets the minimum time it will take to finish your major, regardless of how many credits you load per semester.

Pick your target graduation term. Work backward, placing the terminal courses in your major in your final semesters. Then fill in their prerequisites in the terms before that. Add general education and free electives around the major spine.

This is much faster than building forward, because the hardest constraints in a degree plan live at the end of the chain, not the beginning.

Your plan will change. You will drop a class, change your minor, or discover a course you want to take. Build in one floating elective slot per year so you have room to absorb surprises without losing a term.

A degree plan is not a contract. It is a map. The point is to always know where you are and what comes next.

A spreadsheet is better than nothing, but it cannot tell you when you have satisfied a requirement or broken a prerequisite. Quorum reads your school catalog and evaluates your plan against the real rules, so you can drag a course into a semester and see instantly whether it counts.