Orbit UMD
A live academic planning product used by 2,500+ students across 5+ schools, with a degree-requirement evaluator for 274+ UMD majors.
The problem
Students piece together planning from Testudo, department flowcharts, advisor notes, and group chats. Each source knows one part of the story, and none of them line up cleanly. That makes it easy to take courses out of order or miss a requirement until much later than you should.
What I did
I founded Orbit around connected workflows: course search with section context, a live degree audit, a constraint-based four-year planner that respects prerequisite chains, and multi-school unofficial transcript PDF import. Demo mode uses a fixed student profile so faculty and staff can understand the product without a real account.
How it works
The core systems are React and TypeScript on Supabase: a degree-requirement evaluator for 274+ UMD majors, a prerequisite AST with substitutions, multi-institution catalog ingestion, and term conflict modeling. Auth is multi-tenant Postgres RLS. CI is area-gated through pnpm, Turborepo, and GitHub Actions, with deploys on Vercel and Railway. The demo fixture lives at the data-access layer, so components do not need one-off demo conditionals.
What happened
Orbit is live for 2,500+ students, 450 accounts, and 3,000+ schedules across 5+ schools. I mentored 4 undergraduates as Do Good Summer Impact Interns and secured $5k+ in Do Good funding for the pilot. Reviewers stopped asking what the product did and started asking for specific features, which is where a product conversation gets useful.