NU Map is an independent, student-built course planner. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or officially connected to Northeastern University.
Northeastern already has authoritative tools for most of this. Banner is where you actually register and has the most up-to-date course information, and the degree audit is the authoritative source for your program requirements and what you've completed so far. NU Map isn't trying to replace either of them, or your advisor. What it's trying to replace is the Excel spreadsheet people use to plan their future semesters, because the official tools are built for registering now and verifying what you've already done, and planning ahead was kind of always left to you.
So NU Map is basically that spreadsheet, except it knows the catalog, the prerequisites, the offering history, and your co-op schedule. Plan here, register on Banner, and verify with the audit and your advisor.
Planning used to mean coordinating way too many sources: the catalog for descriptions, Banner for offerings, the audit for requirements, another site for professors, and a spreadsheet holding it all together. The data technically all exists, but it's really hard to get to, since you have to log in every time and click into each course one by one, and the UI is not exactly built for browsing. Just collecting everything into one list took hours.
And even after you get every class lined up, you still have to put them in order, and you can't see the prerequisites! So how are you supposed to figure out what comes before what? And even if you do get the ordering right, you have no idea whether a course is actually offered in the spring or how fast it fills up. Then co-op shifts everything, because your semesters don't just alternate the way the sample plans assume.
So NU Map tries to handle all of that in one place: it shows the prereq chains, checks the plan as you build it, shows when each course actually ran and how full it got, and treats co-ops as part of the plan. Trying a what-if is just making another plan instead of redoing a spreadsheet, and you can hand a finished plan to a roommate or an advisor as a link, a short code, or a PDF.
The main one is that NU Map trusts you. Real degrees are full of special circumstances (substitutions, placed-out courses, transfer credit, things your advisor approved that no tool could know about), so it will basically let you do anything. It warns you when something looks off, but it doesn't stop you.
Everything you enter stays in your browser and never touches a server, which is why there's no account and nothing to track. The privacy policy has the details.
Grades are optional in the same spirit. The planner works completely without them, and you only need them if you want it to check a requirement that names a minimum grade. If you do enter them, they stay on your machine and are left out of every way you can share a plan.
We also wanted everybody to be able to use it. The entire interface works in eight languages, and course information can be translated too, because Northeastern isn't an English-only place, and planning your degree is stressful enough in your first language.
The code and the data are both open, so anyone can check our work.
NU Map is built by two students at Northeastern who plan more than is probably healthy. Before this existed, we did all of this manually, going through every past semester one at a time to figure out when courses actually run and keeping everything lined up in spreadsheets. At some point it made more sense to build the tool we wished we had.