Plant

Landing page
Semester planning page with drag and drop components, major requirements, and AI assistant.

LIVE DEMO - https://hack.ray-shen.me

Inspiration

Every year, the freshman at Northeastern University are put through the harrowing process of planning their four years at Boston. The current app Northeastern forces us to use is old, decrepit, hard to use, unhelpful, and unpleasing to look at. Additionally, it's a one time use thing, freshman are forced to create their plan and they walk away since the app is just that bad. That's why we built Plant, an easy to use, helpful, and aesthetically pleasing course planner with personalized course recommendations, smart planning tools, and AI-powered insights that nurture your academic success. We want to give students the flexibility and ease to change their plans, with smart choices and goal tracking to ensure they graduate on time.

What it does

Plant is an AI-powered academic planning platform designed specifically for Northeastern University students that combines comprehensive course data with intelligent recommendations to help students plan their entire academic journey. The platform features an AI chatbot assistant powered by Google Gemini that provides personalized course recommendations based on a student's major, career goals, and course difficulty ratings (1-5 scale), while offering real-time tracking of graduation requirements across all 72+ Northeastern majors. Students can create semester-by-semester academic plans with drag-and-drop course scheduling, upload and automatically parse their academic transcripts using AI vision, and receive balanced course load recommendations to ensure timely graduation. Plant essentially acts as a personalized academic advisor that knows every course, prerequisite, and requirement at Northeastern, helping students cultivate their educational path from freshman year to graduation with intelligent, data-driven guidance.

How we built it

Plant was built using a modern full-stack approach with Next.js and React as the foundation, featuring TypeScript for type safety and Tailwind CSS with custom plant-themed animations for the nature-inspired UI. The backend leverages Firebase for authentication and Firestore database storage, while Google's Gemini 2.0 Flash AI model powers the intelligent chatbot assistant. The comprehensive course data was gathered through Python web scraping scripts using Beautiful Soup to extract Northeastern University's complete course catalog, which was then processed and enriched with difficulty ratings through custom evaluation algorithms. The application uses a sophisticated data caching system to efficiently serve the 87,000+ courses with difficulty ratings and 23,000+ lines of major requirements, while Next.js API routes handle PDF transcript processing using AI vision capabilities.

Challenges we ran into

Scraping and structuring Northeastern's massive course catalog (79,572 lines) presented significant challenges in data consistency, as course descriptions varied in format and required extensive cleaning to extract standardized information like prerequisites, credits, and course codes. The Python scripts had to handle inconsistent HTML structures and normalize data across different departments.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're extremely proud that we were able to successfully scrape and structure Northeastern University's entire course catalog into 79,572 lines of clean, structured data, creating one of the most complete academic databases for the university. The data processing pipeline handles inconsistent formatting and extracts standardized course information across all departments.

We were then able to take this data, and utilize it for the benefit of students within a 24 hour project lifespan.

What we learned

Managing 1,000+ courses taught us the critical importance of intelligent caching strategies and that loading massive datasets requires careful consideration of user experience. We learned to prioritize perceived performance over raw data availability.

What's next for Plant

With the proven data pipeline and architecture, Plant can expand to other major universities, adapting the scraping and processing systems to handle different academic structures, requirements, and course formats while maintaining the core AI-powered planning experience.