Michigan State University is a public research institution founded in 1855. The Information Technology Services (ITS) unit delivers and maintains effective technology resources for students, faculty and staff.

There are 97 majors of study and more than 100 minors available to students. While only required to complete one major, students can complete any combination of majors and minors as well as participate in the Honors College. Each of these programs has a unique set of graduation requirements, causing students to struggle to keep track of which have been met and which still need to be completed.

Our Degree Navigator application provides an easy-to-use interface for students to check their progress in each of their chosen programs. The landing page displays a summary of each program in which the student is participating &endash; a major, a minor, or the Honors College.

Clicking on any of these programs navigates the user to a list of program requirements in the form of either a specific course or a list of courses. Incomplete requirements are listed at the top. The user can expand a requirement and get more detailed information about which classes can fulfill that requirement or can expand all requirements to view a detailed description of the program.

In addition, students can view recommended four-year course schedules for each major provided by Michigan State. Each course is accompanied by a symbol that represents whether the course was already taken, currently being taken, or not yet taken by the student.

Degree Navigator is developed with Swift for iOS, Kotlin for Android, and ReactJS for web. It uses an AWS API to access information stored in a DynamoDB database via Lambda functions written in Python.