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9/14/23 User Interviews

9/14/23 User Interviews

Owned by Kevin Ge
Last updated: Sept 14, 2023
3 min read

Conclusions

  • Some majors benefit significantly less from Planner - especially those with good advisors (Biomed Eng, pre-med, ATEC)

  • It would be good to focus our user interviews on ECS first due to the first point

  • It might not be that hard to add support for CS masters

 

[Did Not Get Name]

Year: 2 (Sophomore), 2026 grad date

Major: Neuroscience doing pre-med

Do you plan your degree?

No

What do you do when it comes time to register for classes?

  • They book an appointment with their advisor and ask

  • Has to do volunteering for med school

  • Has 2 advisors, one for premed and one for Neuroscience

  • Both advisors actually respond apparently

  • They give him a handout sheet (similar to Excel sheet) with a list of prereqs for Neuroscience and med school

  • Also med school has stuff listed on their website

  • Apparently you can be any major and be premed, premed just means you take certain courses

 

Did not show him planner, it didn’t feel like he would have gained anything from it.

Conclusion

  • Planner is not a good fit for students that can just ask their advisor easily. Especially if their advisor can just walk them through their courses.

 

Aroosh

Biomed, freshman, transferred a bunch of AP creds

  • His advisors were quite responsive

    • For classes specific to his major, his advisors is really good

    • Last time registration, set up meeting with advisor and got all his courses figured out

    • Has a flow chart (similar to the CS one) that he pins up on his wall and he scratches it off

    • Only thing that’s kinda confusing with the flow chart is the cores

      • Want to do core outside of UTD

      • Wants to know if he can substitute one core class for another class for same credit

  • Suggestions:

    • Should diff between honors and nonhonors

    • Why go to flow chart or transcript when he could use planner? Planner = convenience

    • Highlight the necessary classes in search

 

Loais

ATEC and Sophomore

  • With ATEC, degree plans depends on concentration, some courses required for all concentrations

  • Does plan her degree

  • Her advisors send her this Excel sheet that she converted to a Google sheet

    • A list of charts where each charts is a semester and for each course there’s a dropdown of courses you can take

  • Advisors are usually responsive but less responsive this year due to 2 of them leaving

  • A lot of ATEC people don’t know that this spreadsheet exists, so if she talks to an ATEC person who doesn’t know, this is the first thing they recommend to someone

  • Advisors just add transfer credits to excel sheet and sends it to her

  • No real challenges, gets early registration so she doesn’t have to worry about it

Seems like Planner would not be useful to her at all.

 

Anthea Abreo - axa210122@utdallas.edu

CS masters

  • Never talks to her advisor, just talks to past people who have done the masters

  • Also takes courses she finds interesting

  • Spoke to someone who did the masters before her and got an Excel sheet from them

  • Feels like the advisors are so busy there’s no point

  • Resources she uses when planning her degree:

    • Ratemyprof

    • UTD Catalog

    • Friends

  • Sometimes is hard to get the courses she wants, then have to shift the courses aroudn

  • Had to do CS prereqs because she coming from EE

  • Master degrees work pretty much same as undergraduate degrees but they have tracks

  • People will often take overlapping courses and switch tracks to boost their GPA. People can change tracks until their second-to-last semester

 

Eli - eliyel.abera on Discord

Data Science, Freshman

  • For planning, he just looks at undergrad catalog and keeps it in his head

  • Has thought about putting it on a Google Sheet but doesn’t know a good way to organize it

  • Some classes he doesn’t need to take but is going to take because it’ll hep him with internships

  • Haven’t talked to advisors much

  • Had 1 meeting with an advisor to get some classes sorted out but he had to do everything himself

  • Wouldn’t really consider planning the degree elsewhere

 

Nathan

Freshman (Junior by credit), IP = International Political Economy

  • International relations, micro/macroeconomics

  • Degree plans are a mess

    • A few courses are actually IP

    • Lots of classes from other majors

      • Electives are from Polysci

  • Uses Orion schedule thing to plan degree (only plans one semester at a time)

  • Only looks at semester by semester

  • Semesters are very proactive - they come to classes to talk to them, plan events, and talk about what is the plan for registration next semester

  • Very small major so advisors are able to do that