Overview
Transfer Pathway Planner is a full-stack web application that helps students map an efficient path from California community colleges to UC Computer Science programs. It turns the complexity of articulation agreements, prerequisite chains, and course sequencing into a clear, term-by-term plan.
Problem
Transfer planning is fragmented across dozens of curriculum pages, articulation agreements, and advising appointments that not every student has equal access to. Missing a prerequisite dependency or taking courses out of order can delay transfer readiness by an entire year — and most students don’t find out until it’s too late.
What I Built
A student-facing planner with a React and TypeScript frontend backed by a Python API layer and dataset-driven planning services. Users can explore pathway recommendations, validate course selections against prerequisite rules, and adjust their plans with immediate feedback from backend validation logic.
Technical Decisions
The backend is structured around prerequisite-aware scheduling — enforcing course ordering constraints while keeping response times fast. On the frontend, I focused on a clean, mobile-friendly UI that stays intuitive for students with varying levels of advising support, where a confusing interface could actually discourage good planning decisions.
Impact
This project grew directly out of my undergraduate research on California CS transfer pathways. Building the planner on top of that research data meant turning academic findings into something students could actually use — closing the gap between data analysis and practical tooling.