CS Course Planning for Northeastern Students
Published: May 19, 2026Last updated: May 19, 2026By Navigate Tech Hub Team
Requirements for courses at Northeastern (or any college) shift by program and entry year. The purpose of this guide is to give you the knowledge necessary for course planning your first year (and beyond) tied to official Northeastern and Khoury pages.
Official requirements live on four sites
Treat these as your anchors. Open them in tabs before you make any plans:
- Northeastern academic catalog (program pages): https://catalog.northeastern.edu/
- Khoury College (programs and student-facing sections): https://www.khoury.northeastern.edu/
- Khoury’s hub for current undergraduates (advising and academic-policy entry point; subpaths change): https://www.khoury.northeastern.edu/current-undergraduate-students/
- University Registrar (records and policy): https://registrar.northeastern.edu/
Tip: You can paste all these links to Claude and ask it to break down what's relevant to you based on your goals.
You should know that your degree is evaluated against your catalog year (rules tied to your entry term). No other resource is as helpful as your official program page for that year.
Before you build a plan (using degree audit myNEU - myPAWS Instructions), get transfer and placement credit onto the record you will actually register against. A plan built around courses you might not need is a different plan.
Important: Northeastern gives you until the end of your freshman fall semester to transfer up to 32 AP credits (8 exams with a score of a 4/5) and credits from community college. The amount of credits you get from community college classes is up to the discretion of the University Registrar.
Build a semester grid from a prerequisite graph
Take required courses from your official program page and draw prerequisite arrows yourself. Mark:
- Nodes that unlock several downstream courses
- Fall-only or spring-only courses
- Elective lanes (systems, ML, theory, security, HCI, and similar) with their own prereq ladders, not just the core
- Non-CS requirements (math, writing, biology)
- Catalog lines marked “recommended” instead of “required.” Treat those as soft prereqs until advising documents a skip
Two constraints that stay true across cycles:
- Work backward from the first semester you will apply for co-op. Any classes that must be done before that application belongs earlier on the graph than feels comfortable.
- If a required course is only offered in a term where you are scheduled on co-op, you're hurting yourself, double check.
Electives and when to specialize
For more details on how to pick electives, use the internal resource selecting-electives-intentionally. For sequencing, two rules are enough:
- If an elective you want has a prereq chain, pull the earliest link on that chain forward in the grid. Popular sections fill; “I will take it junior year” fails when junior year is full.
- Minors and concentrations look attractive sophomore year. Before you declare, read both the official requirements and the offering pattern for any capstone or concentration-only courses.
Where to verify before you register
Confirm your plan against:
- Your assigned Khoury academic advisor, reached through the current undergraduate hub above.
- The official degree audit workflow the Registrar documents for your entry year. Portal labels change.
- The catalog program page for your catalog year, not the latest catalog if you matriculated earlier.
Bring a plan, ask specific questions, send an email beforehand. These actions help your advisor help you really quickly.
The mistake to avoid
Planning from national CS roadmaps, anonymous forum threads, or “what everyone takes” stories. Those can be useful for culture and difficulty rumors. They are not authoritative for your requirements. A friend who entered two years earlier may be on different rules. If someone says “everyone takes course X second semester,” treat it as a hypothesis. Verify course code, requirement status, and restriction under your catalog year on the official program page before you register.
What you should leave this with
You want a semester grid keyed to your graph (co-op blocks blank on purpose), the same four official URLs in bookmarks, and an “unplanned” list: anything required or desired that still lacks a target semester. That list is what you bring to advising.
What you can do right now!
- Open up degree audit (pasted above)
- Open Claude
- Paste the aforementioned links (at the beginning of the article) inside of Claude alongside this prompt ->
“I’m a freshman at Northeastern majoring in ___ entering in catalog year ___. My AP/transfer credits are ___. I’m interested in areas like ___ (ML, systems, cybersecurity, HCI, fintech, etc.) and I want to eventually ___ (get a co-op at X, do research, pursue a master’s, graduate early, add a minor, etc.).
Based on my official program page and prerequisite chains, help me build a semester-by-semester plan. Ask me questions about workload, co-op timing, electives, transfer credit, math placement, and specialization goals before making the plan.”