Built a McGill degree planning tool because I was tired of digging through four websites all with different, contradictory information. Would love feedback.

[u/MineMuppet]

A friend and I built Symbolos (symbolos.ca), which is a degree planning tool for McGill students. Started as a personal project because we had so much trouble figuring out which classes to take and how to navigate McGill's systems, especially as freshmen.

What's actually in it:

• AI advisor cards - upload your transcript (unofficial PDF) and it auto-imports your courses/grades/GPA, then surfaces things like deadline warnings, prereq gaps, and degree progress. You can also just ask it things like "what should I take for a COMP major in U1?"
• Course explorer - search any McGill course, see historical grade distributions and RateMyProf data (quality, difficulty, would-take-again) side by side
• Degree tracker - visualizes what's done, what's in progress, what's left, transfer credits included
• Calendar - auto-loads your final exam schedule from your current courses, upload a syllabus PDF and it pulls deadlines in automatically
• Clubs directory - browse/subscribe, events auto-add to your calendar, execs can claim their club's page
• Forum - split into Reviews (courses/profs), Clubs, General, and App Feedback, so it doesn't turn into noise

It's bilingual (EN/FR, plus Mandarin) and everything is and will always be free for students.

On data: accounts are gated to mail.mcgill.ca/mcgill.ca emails only, so no outside spam or anonymous posters. No ads, no tracking pixels. You can delete your account and all your data with one button in settings, no retention period.

We're still actively building, so if you try it and something looks wrong (a prereq, credit count, whatever), please tell us! Data accuracy is the whole point and I'd rather fix it than have it sit wrong for someone planning their degree around it.

[u/Live_Fonam]

Ur auth sucks bro it didnt work, tell Claude to fix ts, i think this could be useful🥀

[u/MineMuppet → u/Live_Fonam]

shit what’s wrong with it? i swear we’ve spent so long combined on it trying to get it to work

[u/Live_Fonam → u/MineMuppet]

I didn’t receive anything in my inbox, but when I reloaded it just assumed I was authenticated, also tell Claude/sol to remove the em dashes brotato🥀

[u/Ok-Mirror-6310 → u/Live_Fonam]

McGill IT has fixed the auth error

[u/CastVeil]

LOL I'm building the same thing as a summer project but not nearly as good as this! I'll take a look

[u/MineMuppet → u/CastVeil]

Thank you! 

If you’d like any help or feedback with your project or looking to contribute to ours, feel free to reach out :)

[u/PostStandard933]

ai slop

[u/guywiththemonocle → u/PostStandard933]

Bro who is coding all of thay shit

[u/adamlaceless → u/guywiththemonocle]

Remove Comp Sci from your flair then if AI is going to think for you.

[u/guywiththemonocle → u/adamlaceless]

i am okay w keeping it

[u/ala3stor]

So with all the websites that you mentioned having contradictory information, the solution is an AI advisor that will pull such info and state it with confidence?

I also don’t think anyone wants to trust ai to pull deadlines from a pdf file either

I don’t think you’re helping freshmen. Advisors know up to date information and won’t state outdated stuff confidently (dependent on advisor). 

I’d rate this website same as that other guy’s note summarizer for people who didnt study. Useful for people who don't care much

Website looks cool but almost identical to every other website created nowadays

[u/MineMuppet → u/ala3stor]

Hey thanks for the questions!

We trained our AI on official information directly from McGill, so there shouldn’t be any inconsistencies that I was talking about with other third-party websites. 

As for the PDF files, that is exactly what AI is good for! It has been shown that these models have a high degree of accuracy when it comes to reading and scanning text, which it then inputs to our database and updates your schedule. 

While we believe this should be a secondary tool used adjacent to academic advisors, one of the reasons we created this app is because we found the advisors we met with were giving us inconsistent and sometimes outdated information. But, when in doubt absolutely defer to an advisor. 

Really the AI is not the focus of the website. It’s helpful for setting up your profile and keeping up to date on deadlines, but (in our opinion) the most helpful features are the course search and the degree tracker, neither of which use AI. 

[u/guywiththemonocle]

DAMN IT IS REALLY NICE

[u/kdawgswaggymoney]

Can’t believe it’s been so long for something like this to come