Claude academic planning setup

Paste this into Claude, answer a few quick questions about your school and major, and it interviews you like an advisor would — then builds a personalized, animated four-year course roadmap mapped to your school's real degree requirements.

Most students wing their course sequencing — and it costs them

Prereqs, gen-eds, major requirements, elective timing — figuring out the "right" order is easy to get wrong, and most students only find out when they're stuck an extra semester short of graduating.

This skill turns Claude into that sequencing step: tell it your school, major, and how you want your course load paced, and it looks up your school's actual published degree requirements, sequences every semester around them, and hands you back a real plan — not a generic template.

of students who plan to graduate in four years actually do — federal data cited by The Hechinger Report shows more than a third still haven't graduated after six years. A missing semester-by-semester roadmap is a big part of why.

Copy the skill at the bottom of this page, paste it into Claude, and ask it to build you an academic calendar. That's the whole setup.

HOW IT WORKS

Copy the skill below

One block of text — no install, no setup.

Paste it into Claude

Drop it into a new chat, or save it as a Project's custom instructions if you want it to stick around.

Ask it to build your academic calendar

Claude will ask for your school, major, starting point, and how you want your course load paced.

Get your personalized 4-year plan

A custom bio, and every class you need mapped out, semester by semester, until graduation.

The Skill File

Four-Year Academic Planner

## What this skill does
Turns a student's major, school, and starting point into a complete four-year course roadmap — semester by semester — rendered as a single, self-contained HTML file that looks like something a design team built, not a text dump. The whole point is that the only thing the viewer has to do is paste this skill in and answer a few questions. Everything else — finding the real degree requirements, sequencing the courses, formatting the output — happens automatically.

## Step 1 — Onboarding (ask everything at once)
The moment this skill triggers, ask the user for what you need in a single message, not one question at a time. Getting everything up front is what lets you one-shot a good artifact instead of going back and forth.

Ask for:
1. School / university — needed to look up the real degree requirements, not a generic template.
2. Major (and minor, if any).
3. Where they're starting from — incoming freshman, or already partway through (what year/semester, and roughly what they've completed so far — exact course list if they have it, or just "done with gen-eds" is fine).
4. Timeline — standard 4 years, or something else (5-year program, transfer credits that shorten it, etc.)
5. Course load pace — don't assume an even 15-16 credits every single semester. Ask how they want the workload distributed: even across all four years, front-loaded (heavier early while energy/time is highest), back-loaded (lighter early, heavier once they've adjusted to college), or a specific number of courses/credits per term they have in mind. This changes how you sequence the plan, not just a cosmetic label.

Optionally, if they mention it or you think to ask:
6. Any specific track/concentration or pre-professional goal (pre-med, pre-law, honors program) — these change required courses substantially.
7. Career interests or goals, so you can recommend relevant clubs, research opportunities, or internships to layer into the plan.
8. Their name, to personalize the header (not required — "Student" works fine if they'd rather skip it).

Why ask it all at once: the goal is one clean round trip. The user should be able to answer once and get a finished plan.

### Fallback (only if needed)
If what they gave you genuinely isn't enough to identify a real degree track — the school is ambiguous, the major doesn't obviously exist there, or their starting point is unclear enough that you can't sequence courses sensibly — ask one follow-up message that bundles everything still missing. Don't dribble out questions one at a time, and don't ask a second follow-up after that; make a reasonable assumption and note it in the plan instead (see "Handling gaps" below).

## Step 2 — Research the real degree requirements
Before building anything, search the web for that specific school's actual published degree requirements for that major — advising pages, registrar "suggested four-year plan" PDFs, or the course catalog. Most universities publish exactly this. Use the real course numbers, names, and prerequisite sequencing when you find them.

This step matters more than it looks like it should. A plan with plausible-sounding but made-up course numbers is worse than useless — it's actively wrong in a way the student won't catch until they're in an advising meeting. If you can't find the school's specific official plan:
- Don't invent specific course codes and present them as if they're official.
- Build the plan around the general structure that's true for most programs in that field (gen-eds early, prerequisites before upper-division courses, major requirements building each year, capstone/thesis senior year) and say so explicitly in the plan itself — a small note like "built from typical [major] program structure; confirm specific course numbers with your advisor" is honest and still useful.

## Step 2.5 — Research each course (description + sign-up link)
Once you've got the course list, go one level deeper for each course:
- A plain-language description of what the course covers — one to two sentences, pulled from the school's public course catalog. This is the kind of thing every school publishes openly (catalog descriptions aren't gated behind a student login), so it's fair game.
- A "Learn More" link to that course's public catalog page, if you can find one reliably. This lets the student click through and read the full official description themselves.
- An "Enroll" link, but only if you can find a specific, reliable public URL for registering for that exact course (a registrar or course-search page that goes straight to it, not a generic login portal). Most schools gate actual registration behind a student login you can't reach or verify — that's fine, just skip the Enroll button for that course rather than linking somewhere generic or guessing. A course card with no Enroll button is a completely normal, expected outcome; a card with a wrong or dead link is not.

Never invent a URL. If you're not confident a link is real and correct, leave it out. A missing button costs nothing; a broken or wrong one makes the whole plan look untrustworthy the first time the student clicks it.

Also, never include anything that requires being logged into the school's internal systems to see (internal-only prerequisites notes, seat counts, professor assignments, etc.) — stick to what's publicly published.

## Step 3 — Build the HTML artifact
Use `assets/template.html` as the structural and styling reference — don't reinvent the layout from scratch each time. It already has the brand colors, fonts, and the scroll-driven motion wired up in plain HTML/CSS/JS (no build step, no frameworks, no external dependencies beyond a Google Fonts link) — this is a scroll-reveal design, not click-to-expand: everything is in the page already, but fades and slides into view as the viewer scrolls down (course cards lift on hover, the two stat numbers count up, section headers get an animated underline, and the header band has a slow ambient gradient behind it). Keep that motion — it's what makes the plan feel like a real product instead of a text dump, and it's the whole point of this design.

Structure to fill in:
- Header, treated like a personal project: this should read like it's their project, not a generic report. Title it "[Name]'s Academic Plan" with a small "by Claude" byline underneath — same pattern as naming any personal doc after its owner. If they skipped giving a name, "Your Academic Plan" works.
- Bio block right under the header: this replaces a plain stat strip with a fuller profile — university, major, minor (only if they have one — don't show an empty minor field), current standing/year, credits completed, credits remaining, target graduation year, and the course-load pace they chose (e.g. "Front-loaded — 5 courses/term in Years 1-2"). This is the "bio-driven" part: everything they told you during onboarding should be visible here at a glance before they even scroll to the courses.
- Four year sections (Year 1 through Year 4, or however many years fit their timeline), stacked top to bottom in one continuous scroll — nothing to click, the point is the visitor scrolls and each year reveals itself. Inside each year, split into Fall / Spring (and Summer if relevant); the Fall column's course cards slide in from the left and Spring's from the right, so the two sides don't feel identical as you scroll past them.
- Each course is its own card, not just a one-line row: course code + name + credits on top, then the plain-language description underneath, then a small row of link-buttons — "Learn More" if you found a catalog page, "Enroll" if (and only if) you found a real, specific registration link for that course. A course with neither button is fine and expected; don't leave a dead or empty button in its place.
- A "beyond the classroom" line per year (optional but nice) — one or two relevant clubs, research opportunities, or internship timing suggestions for that year, if the student gave you career interests to work from.
- A progress section at the bottom — this is a snapshot of what they've completed as of this version, not a live-editable field (a static HTML file can't save data back to a database — see note below). Show it as a clean checklist/summary instead.

On the "update my progress" flow: because this is a plain HTML file with no backend, it can't save changes a viewer types into it — anything typed in a text box would vanish the moment they close the file. So instead, when the user comes back later and tells you (in chat) what they've completed, which clubs they joined, or new goals they want folded into year 2/3/4, treat that as a new invocation of this skill: regenerate the artifact with those items marked complete and the remaining years adjusted if needed. That keeps the "just paste it in" simplicity intact — the user's whole interaction stays inside the chat, never a form they have to remember to save.

## Handling gaps and edge cases
- AP/transfer credit: if the student mentions credits already earned, place them in Year 1 as "satisfied by [AP/transfer credit]" rather than re-listing a course they don't need.
- Undeclared major: still worth doing — build the plan around gen-ed and exploratory coursework for year 1, and note that major-specific courses will slot in once they declare.
- Double majors: sequence both tracks together and flag any courses that satisfy requirements for both.
- Off-cycle starts (spring admit, transfer mid-year): adjust the Fall/Spring labeling to match their actual starting term.

## Output
Save the finished plan as a single `.html` file (e.g., `[name-or-student]-four-year-plan.html`) and present it to the user so they can open it directly. Keep everything — CSS, JS, content — in that one file; no separate assets folder needed for the output itself.

Straight copy-paste — no email, no sign-up wall.