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PCC students can now stop struggling to organize their school schedule with the help of Schedule Planner, a brand new program implemented in a student’s Lancerpoint personal page, starting from registration time for Winter and Spring 2017.

The Schedule Planner is franchised from the College Schedule, originally created by Civitas Learning. The program was first founded in CSU Chico by sophomore Robert Strazzarino, officially licensed in 2005, and has since spread to 200 institutions with about three million students. Schedule Planner was embedded in Lancerpoint at the beginning of November and is now ready for students to use both on and off-campus.

“Lots of students have commitments outside of school…and the program will allow the students to visualize what their schedule will look like in the fall,” Myriam Altounji, one of the counselors involved in the program, said. “I think that is really important for time management…especially when you can have your schedule ahead of time and ready for registration date.”

One of the Planner’s most helpful features is the “Break” option, in which the students can put the time period that they are not available to attend classes. After they input the break time and choose the courses, the program will generate one, or many, schedules that fit within the given time frames. Students then can choose whichever schedule works for them, put it in the shopping cart, and the CRN of the courses will be remembered on Lancerpoint until they register for their classes.  

The counseling team was very excited to launch the program, according to Altounji. All of PCC’s counselors were  trained prior to use the program to help students plan their schedule. During the registration time frame, there will be counselors available in the lab downstairs of the L-building to assist students scheduling their classes.

“I’ve used the program at another institution that I work at, CSU Long Beach, and the students really like it,” Hayarpi Nersisyan, a successful coach who was helping in the L-building lab, said. “Students don’t ever have to paper write what classes they need to take, they can just have the Schedule Planner generate classes for them.”

Nersisyan also explained one of the other highlights of the program: an option for the students to lock in their favorite or most wanted section. Once they have locked in their section, the program will generate every other class on their schedule around the already locked-in courses.

Nevertheless, the program does not personally register beforehand for the students or guarantee a seat for classes that are waitlisted or already closed. If a class is closed before the student can register, they can always come back to generate a new schedule with a different class.

Counselor Altounji also emphasized that the program has not made its official big release for the students due to unexpected errors.

“This is only a soft launch…Once it gets to the student’s side, we don’t know yet what kind of troubleshooting it will have,” Altounji said.

She explained that the team would be waiting on students’ first interactions to develop a Q&A section for errors or more information about the program.

“Never in the history of installing software has it been totally cleaned…And if [the program] is broken, we don’t have the capacity to support it. That’s the challenge for us right now, because we are not ready to release it,” Altounji said.

How to get to the Planner from Lancerpoint:

1. Log into Lancerpoint account
2. Click on Classes & Academics tab, then click on Add/Drop Classes
3. Click on the Student tab
4. Click on the Registration box
5. Scroll down to nearly the end of the page and click on Schedule Planner
6. Complete the Schedule Surveys and follow the shown steps to create a schedule  

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