How I Organize My University Course Guide

What's up, this is my first non-journal post so I thought I'd kick it off with an organization tip. Carson knows I love those. When I got to university I found that it was hard to figure out when I should take what courses (even figuring out what courses I had to take was a challenge), especially with pre recs and anti recs - the whole deal. After taking my first excel based course in business school I created a large excel file that organized my whole five year, cross faculty degree and I'm going to show you how you can make one as well!

Step 1: Locate your academic requirements

This is a list of all courses required of you to complete your degree that can usually be found in your student portal. Most undergraduate degrees require 40 credit from you, or 4 years of full course load courses in the fall and winter semesters. For myself, as I'm doing a combined degree, I need 50 credits, or five years of a full 5 course per semester course load. The only issue with this list is it doesn't provide you any insight usually on the pre recs or have any specific order of courses. This is where the next steps get a little tricky

Step 2: Record all your required courses

What I did next was write down all the courses that were required of me and then found their corresponding pages on the university website to find the pre recs and credit requirements. For example, some business courses will require that you have been admitted to the business school, have completed Stat, Math, MGST and SGMA with at least a C- and have successfully completed at least 30 credits. This can be a little confusing especially when you aren't looking ahead at the big picture of what courses to take and when.

Step 3: Order courses in order of pre recs

Now that you know all the pre recs, you can order the course based off of them so no course will come before its mandatory requirement. That way, when you're choosing your course orders later on you can ensure that the pre recs will be satisfied well before you plan on taking the course. Next is the fun part.

Step 4: Setting up the excel

First up is creating the columns. As I mentioned, I am studying two degree which means that I will have two different degree requirements. I am also majoring in International Business which means I have to have a second language proficiency.

This is how I set up my columns. As you can see, I made a column for the course name and directly beside that is the course pre recs so you can visually see every time you make changes to your schedule whether or not you have the pre recs satisfied. Beside that I have the satis. business, satis. coms and satis. language which outlines what the course is satisfying. This may make more sense later on when I show you the complete courses, however, I'll try to explain it here. In your degree guide it should outline what the course is "satisfying" which can be something like a junior option, a breadth requirement of a senior option. Most degrees specify a certain number of credits at the senior and junior option level and this is where you can keep track of that. Beside that I have a column to track my final grade received in that course which helps in tracking the GPA as well as making sure I achieved the C- grade that is required of most pre recs. The following two columns outline the year and semester that I plan on taking that course. These are the two important columns for when course registration comes around and you know exactly when you should take each course.

The next step is filling in the courses that you outlined in step 2 and 3. This is a sample of mine. You know the pre recs and the course satisfactions from your course outline so the only new step to you is figuring out when you want to take each course. As you can see from mine, I colour coded my years so I have an easier time visualizing what courses are going to occur in each semester. The large blue highlight signifies courses that I have successfully completed. This way of grouping them just made it a whole lot easier for me to group together the courses since I find it sometimes hurts my eyes trying to match the names with the semester. This photo is also really good at showing you how the satisfactions are filled it. I also added in a few different highlights to help keep track of some of my course satisfactions, for example: blue high light is for 300 level commerce core courses, red is for my topic coms courses and green are my concentration electives that satisfy my specialization in international business. You can also see that beside some of the satisfaction I put in bracket which number out of the total required the course satisfies. This doesn't come directly from the requirements page but it did specify that I needed 6 topic coms courses and once I start using the sort function to organize the courses it was difficult to keep track of whether or not I had accounted for all six of those courses.

Step 5: Organize with excel functions!

Now I'll show you how you can organization and reorganize using some of the excel functions. This makes it super easy for you to change which semester you want to take the course without having to add/delete different rows.

The first time you organize you should just go through and randomly add the year and semester you want to take the course. That way you have a basis. Then, use the following excel feature to organize your schedule.

Highlight the entire course schedule including the titles. It's very important you include the titles.

Next on the data tab in the tool bar and select the sort feature

This is my favourite excel feature and I don't know why. When you clik on sort you'll be brought to this pop up. This is where you tell excel how you want it to sort the data.

This is how the pop-up will look when you first open it. We'll be dealing with the colume and Order buttons as well as the +/- so make sure you locate those.

This is the setting you want to set. To get here you'll use the drop downs to select year from the "column" column and the "Smallest to Largest" from the order column. This will ensure that you are sorting your course schedule from your first year to your last year. Then, hit the + icon and it will add an identical row. This one you want to sort the same way as above only by semester instead. This way your table will be organized by year and then semester in ascending order.

Once you do this your table will be organized based off of the year and semester and you can go in and reorganize as you please if you don't like how it's looking. To change the location of the course, just type in the semester you want the course to be moved to in the year and semester columns in your table and then highlight the table and come back to this sort functions. The presets will stay the same as when you set it the first time and you can just hit OK and it will move the course for you.

Hopefully this helped you organize your schedule a little bit if you didn't already know how to do this. It definitely made me feel a lot less overwhelmed and gave me a lot more power over my degree.