How NYU Stern made course-lottery season something students actually trust.
NYU Stern's Langone MBA program piloted Sternie, the first deployment of Campus Intelligence, to give students accurate, institution-controlled answers across courses, events, and policies.
The challenge
Each semester, Stern's MBA course lottery compresses thousands of high-stakes decisions into a two-week window. Students had to verify prerequisites across specializations, cross-reference professor schedules, and decode delivery modes by digging through long PDFs, spreadsheets, and out-of-date web pages, often without finding a reliable answer at all. And every question they gave up on landed in a staff inbox.
The solution
Ontography built Sternie a verified model of Stern's world: courses, sections, instructors, events, and policies, connected the way they actually relate, so compound questions like "in-person Finance courses taught on Mondays" come back complete and correct, not almost-right.
Sternie launched behind Stern's own access controls: only the Stern community could use it, students saw only content approved for their program, and every answer carried its citation. The school stayed in control of every word.
The impact
During the pilot, Sternie answered student questions entirely from approved institutional data. Students planned and submitted their lottery selections with confidence, and Sternie became the go-to for everyday logistics, from finding a classroom to identifying the right email to drop a course. The repetitive lookups stopped flooding staff inboxes, leaving more time for the students who needed real support.
"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 campus one answer it can trust.
See what it looks like when students get the right answer in seconds, and your staff get their time back for the work no software can do: the relationships and reputation your institution is really built on.