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Masters Application and Scholarship Deadline Planner

A web app for students applying to masters programmes and scholarships abroad: add each application with its deadline, time zone, fees and documents, and the app works backwards to a week-by-week plan, flags clashes and tracks referees. A beginner final year project with real users in every graduating class.

Topics
Difficulty

Beginner

Achievable by one student in a semester with familiar tools.
Effort

8 to 10 weeks · 1 or 2 students

Deliverables

8 to ship

3 optional extras

Suggested stack

Next.js or ReactNode.jsPostgreSQL or SQLitePrismaLuxon or date-fns-tz for time zonesScheduled email remindersTailwind CSS
A suggestion, not a requirement. Swap anything for what you already know.

What you should ship

  • Accounts and a list of target programmes and scholarships, each with its deadline stored with the institution's time zone, fee, intake and official link
  • A document checklist per application (statement of purpose, CV, recommendation letters, transcripts, test scores, passport) with shared documents linked across applications
  • A backwards planner that turns each deadline into dated tasks from editable rules, such as ask referees six weeks before
  • A dashboard showing the next 14 days, overdue tasks and clash weeks where several deadlines fall close together
  • Referee tracking per letter: asked, reminded, submitted, confirmed by the university
  • Email reminders before each task and deadline, with every date shown in the student's own time zone and the institution's
  • A last-checked date on every official link, with a nudge to re-check deadlines older than 30 days
  • Unit tests for time zone conversion and the backwards plan, including a daylight saving change

If you have time left

  • A budget view totalling application fees, test fees and courier costs by month
  • A read-only share link so a parent or mentor can see progress
  • CSV import of deadlines and an iCal feed the student can subscribe to in their calendar

The problem students face with masters and scholarship deadlines

Applying for a masters abroad means juggling ten or more deadlines across programmes, scholarships, English tests and visa steps, often in different time zones, with referees who need weeks of notice. A fully funded scholarship might close months before the university's own deadline, a test score takes time to be sent, and a referee who is travelling can sink an application. Most students manage all of this with a messy spreadsheet and a group chat, and something gets missed.

The pain is sharpest for first-generation applicants without a mentor who has done it before, which describes many students in Pakistan and across South Asia and Africa applying for programmes such as Chevening, Fulbright, DAAD or Erasmus Mundus.

What already exists and the gap

  • Mastersportal and the DAAD scholarship database help students discover programmes and funding, but they are search tools, not planners.
  • Notion and spreadsheet templates shared by applicants are flexible but have no reminders, no time zone logic and no backwards planning.
  • Generic to-do apps handle reminders but know nothing about referees, shared documents or deadline clashes.

The gap is a planner that understands the shape of an application: one deadline expands into many dependent tasks, documents are shared across applications, and deadlines must be stored in the institution's time zone.

What you build

One main role, the applicant, with an optional read-only viewer (a parent or mentor).

  • Applications: programme or scholarship, institution, country, intake, deadline with time zone, fee, official link and status.
  • Documents: a checklist per application; shared documents such as your CV or test scores are linked across applications, while a tailored statement of purpose stays per application.
  • Planner: rules that work backwards from each deadline (request letters six weeks before, final statement three weeks before, submit three days early), editable by the student.
  • Dashboard: the next two weeks, overdue tasks, and clash weeks.
  • Referees: when you asked, reminded and when the letter was confirmed.
  • Reminders: a daily job that emails what is due.

The technically interesting part

The hard part is dates and time zones. "15 January" at a Californian university ends many hours after it ends in Lahore or Lagos, and treating deadlines as plain dates will eventually make someone miss one. Store each deadline as a local date and time plus an IANA time zone, compute the instant in UTC, and display both the institution's time and the student's. Handle daylight saving changes between the day the task is created and the day it is due, and write tests for them.

The second part is the backwards plan as data: rules are offsets from a deadline, and when a deadline moves, every dependent task should move with it without duplicating reminders. Make the reminder job idempotent so a rerun never sends the same email twice.

How to evaluate it

  • Correctness: a test file of at least 15 deadline scenarios across time zones and daylight saving boundaries, all passing.
  • User pilot: at least 10 classmates use it through one application season; count applications tracked, reminders sent and tasks completed on time.
  • Usability: ask five students to add an application and see their next task without help; record time and errors.
  • Reliability: reminder job logs over the pilot showing no duplicates or missed sends.

Suggested plan

  1. Week 1: interview five students who applied last year; collect their real spreadsheets.
  2. Weeks 2 to 3: data model, applications and documents.
  3. Weeks 4 to 5: backwards planner, time zone handling and tests.
  4. Weeks 6 to 7: dashboard, referee tracking and reminders.
  5. Weeks 8 to 10: pilot with classmates, fix issues, write up results.

Path to a product

Your first users are your own batch. The natural paying customers are university career offices and study-abroad consultants who manage many students at once: a counsellor view across students is a clear paid tier, priced per counsellor seat. Keep the individual student plan free to build word of mouth. Scale by adding shared deadline templates that counsellors maintain, always linked to official pages.

Scope warning

Do not scrape university websites; deadlines change and scraping is fragile. Manual entry with an official link and a last-checked date is more honest. Do not try to list every university in the world; the value is the planning, not the database. Do not give admissions advice inside the app.

Learn what you need on Sefism

Get help with this idea

This is a strong first real product if you keep it focused on planning and get real applicants using it. Tauseef can help you trim the scope, get the time zone model right and design a pilot your examiners will value. If you are new here, create a free account first.

Ideas and guidance, not finished projects

These are project ideas and scoping guidance, published free for students to use as a starting point. I do not build, write, or sell final-year projects, and I do not complete coursework for anyone. Take an idea, make it yours, and build it.

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