Compose your first plan

A plan in IDDT is more than a course list. It is a written argument that the courses you have chosen, taken in the sequence you have chosen, add up to a coherent degree. This article walks you through composing your first plan from a blank slate so that, when you hand it to your advisor, it reads like an intentional document instead of a checklist.

Open Plan Builder for the first time

Sign in and pick Plan builder from the left rail. The first time you land in the builder it asks you to start a draft. Choose Compose a new plan. You will be prompted for three pieces of metadata before the canvas appears:

1. Concentration name — the title you want printed on your degree audit. It can be a SUNY Empire pre-defined concentration, or a custom title you and your advisor agree on. You can edit this later.
2. Anticipated completion term — a guess is fine. The builder uses this to highlight terms that already have offerings published.
3. Catalog year — defaults to your matriculation year. Change this only if your registrar has confirmed a catalog migration in writing.

You will land on an empty plan canvas with the metadata pinned to the top. Nothing is saved yet, so the canvas is yours to experiment in.

Save before you build

Click Save draft in the top action bar before you add any courses. A draft with no courses is still a valid IDDT record — it gives you a plan id you can quote in an email to your advisor and it puts the plan into your version history, so any work you do next is recoverable.

Lay out the terms

Plan Builder organises a plan into terms. Each term is a column on the canvas. To add a term, click Add term at the right end of the term row and pick the season + year. We recommend laying out every term you expect to study before you start dragging courses in. Working out the shape first means you will spot scheduling conflicts (e.g. a fall-only course slotted into a spring) before you commit to them.

Pick courses from the catalog

Open the Catalog drawer on the right side of the canvas. You can:

• Filter by category (Arts and Humanities, Social Sciences, etc.).
• Filter by mode (online, residency, hybrid).
• Search by course code or keyword.

Drag a course from the drawer onto the term you want it in. The course card snaps into place and the catalog updates the credit total for the term it just landed in.

Pin a course to a requirement bucket

Every course in IDDT must answer a requirement. The right rail shows your concentration's requirement buckets — General Education, Concentration Core, Advanced Study, and so on. Drag a course card onto a bucket to pin it. Pinned courses count toward that bucket's credit minimum; the bucket header turns gold when the minimum is met.

You can repin a course later if you change your concentration shape; nothing about the assignment is permanent until the plan is submitted.

Write the rationale

The Rationale panel is the heart of an IDDT plan. Open it from the plan action bar. You will see one prompt per requirement bucket:

• "Why does this group of courses satisfy the requirement?"
• "What is the academic argument tying these courses together?"
• "What prior learning (work, military, prior coursework) shapes the choices in this bucket?"

Write in your own voice. Aim for one paragraph per bucket. Advisors read every word — short, sharp arguments review faster than verbose ones.

Save and review

When you click Save draft the builder runs a validation pass and flags any unmet requirements or unmoored courses. Fix the flags it shows you before you move on; the advisor queue will surface the same flags if you ignore them.

What to do next

Once the canvas, the requirement pins, and the rationale all look right, move on to Send your plan to your advisor — it covers the submission flow, attachment policy, and what the advisor sees on their side of the queue.