About

How We Got Started

Our Plan Builder grew out of the frustration that GradSync founder Thom Hines, a design professor at Portland State University, felt about the lack of quality tools available for academic advisors. Every term, students came into his advising sessions feeling anxious and uncertain about graduation requirements. Nearly every session consisted of repeating the same complicated explanations, drawn from dozens of confusing—often conflicting—advising resources to help his students understand what they needed to do to graduate and why. These conversations were even more challenging when a student came with less common needs or situations, such as transfer students, returning students, or students with full-time jobs.

Not only were these advising meetings inefficient and repetitive, but the process of cross-checking registration records with the course catalog, calculating upper-division credits, and verifying every prerequisite introduced more chances that an essential detail was overlooked. A mistake here could lead to a student to take unnecessary classes, defer graduation, or even drop out. With his experience as an interaction designer and app developer, Thom wanted to do something about it.

As GradSync began to be developed, other uses and benefits of this data quickly became obvious. Advisors could know which students were no longer on the path to success and which ones still had a solid plan. Schools could see years in the future and know which classes students planned to take when. And with all of the curricular information built into the app itself, it became virtually impossible for a someone to create an plan that would send a student down the wrong road.

Schools are complex. But with good design, smart automation, a flexible platform, and the right data, that complexity can also ensure that every student’s needs are met. And that’s why GradSync was founded: to give schools and their students the tools to succeed.