How NYU Stern made course-lottery season something students actually trust.
NYU Stern's Langone MBA program piloted Sternie, Ontography's flagship deployment, to give students accurate, institution-controlled answers across courses, events, and policies.
The challenge
Each semester, Stern's MBA course lottery generates a flood of queries during a two-week window. Students had to verify prerequisites across specializations, cross-reference professor schedules, and decode delivery modes by manually navigating long PDFs, faculty spreadsheets, and out-of-date web pages, often without finding a reliable answer at all.
The solution
Ontography preprocessed Stern's unstructured catalogs, calendars, and policy documents into a structured knowledge graph with validated entity relationships. A multi-agent retrieval architecture routes each question to specialized agents (courses, events, instructors) and returns the intersection for compound queries like "in-person Finance courses taught on Mondays."
Deployed behind @stern.nyu.edu
email whitelisting with topic-based access control, students only saw content for their
program, and every answer was grounded and cited.
The impact
During the pilot, Sternie answered student questions from approved institutional data without falling back to general web search. Students planned and submitted their lottery selections with confidence, and Sternie became the go-to resource for everyday logistics, from finding a classroom to identifying the right email to drop a course.
"Cannot underscore how helpful it can be for handling NYU student logistics in real-time and over the long-term."
Student voices
I've successfully gotten into all my lottery selection classes. The most significant upgrade was not having to navigate the nested elements across the traditional portal dropdowns. Sternie took my casual questions and surfaced everything I needed to confidently submit my priority selections.
I can ask anything, from which Finance professors students recommend to which Fall courses count toward FinTech, and get clear, instant answers. When the lottery window opens, it's the only tool I use.
Sternie narrows it down and takes me straight to the correct link, which saves a ton of time. I recommend starting any query with Sternie before digging through bookmarked pages or FAQ links.
Before Sternie, it was so hard to find certain information quickly. It's streamlined my experience as a student and Stern employee.
Give your institution answers it can trust.
To book a demo or get in touch, email us at hello@ontography.ai.
hello@ontography.ai