MDSP2630: A Quick and Dirty Semester Planner for Pitt MDS Students

MDSP2630 is live. It’s a “quick and dirty” planner for University of Pittsburgh MDS students finishing up the PBA course and staring down the rest of the degree.

The program runs its CMPINF classes on a rotation. Some run every semester, some skip Summer, a few skip Fall entirely. Planning around that rotation in a spreadsheet meant every year change came with manual Yes/No bookkeeping. So I took the bookkeeping out of the loop.

Point your browser at MDSP2630 and you get:

Tracks the real MDS class offerings schedule
Plans A and B side by side, with an Add Plan button for when two futures are not enough
Semester dropdowns with a Sequential Lock for back-to-back schedules. Uncheck it if you plan to take a semester off
A Class Offerings grid that redraws its Yes/No pattern the moment you change any semester
Red flags when a class lands in a semester it does not run in, and it catches duplicates too
A Share Link that packs your whole schedule into a URL. No accounts, nothing stored server side, it saves in your browser

MDSP2630 planner in its default state: five semester dropdowns with Sequential Lock on, empty Plans A and B, and the class offerings grid below — The blank slate.

MDSP2630 planner with Plans A and B partly filled in, every placement showing green as valid against the class offerings grid — Two half-built plans. Green means the rotation will actually let you do that.

Is it fancy? No. It is quick, it is dirty, and it knows the course rotation better than I do. That was the whole assignment.