HUA Debuts Harvy, An AI-Powered Course Search Engine

The Harvard Undergraduate Association unveiled Harvy, an artificial intelligence-powered search engine that assists students with course registration, in an email to the student body last week.

The tool helps students find courses for the upcoming semester by recommending classes based on academic information they provide and answers prompt-based questions about Harvard’s course offerings.

“You can upload your transcript, or manually input your profile, then search for courses directly with the Q guide, create your class calendar, and ask the custom AI anything about classes, requirements, your academic plan, and everything in between,” HUA Academic Team Officer Hyunsoo Lee ’28 wrote in the email.

Harvy was built last summer by Shreshth Rajan ’27, independent of the HUA. In an interview, Rajan cited others’ frustrations with Harvard’s academic advising infrastructure as inspiration to build Harvy.

“I spend a lot of my time thinking about AI research, and I’m very interested in retrieval systems,” Rajan said. “Some of my friends were complaining about how their advisers weren’t always the most helpful for answering questions, so I figured it'd be a fun way to test out some retrieval mechanisms I was exploring.”

“We have a lot of tools for signing up for classes, but I think navigating all of that information is very difficult,” he added.

Harvard undergraduates can currently turn to assigned Peer Advising Fellows and department-specific concentration advisers for help with selecting courses, alongside online tools offered by Harvard to track students’ progress meeting academic requirements. A pilot program that assigned freshmen to faculty pre-concentration advisers will phase out next month.

Knowledge of Harvy originally spread “by word of mouth alone,” Rajan said. Then the HUA reached out to him with interest in expanding the tool’s use. Lee, the academic team officer, said the HUA helped Rajan clear the tool by Harvard administrators before sharing it with the undergraduate student body.

Part of that process, Lee said, involved making sure that Harvy did not violate the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, a federal law governing access to student records.

Doing so meant “making sure students’ transcripts, academic records, are protected, and making sure there are no ways to hack the website,” Lee said. “We have gone through that process to make sure it's privacy safe.”

Lee added that he hopes the launch of Harvy encourages other student organizations to develop projects that serve their peers.

“I’m hoping to create a culture where HUA, or any student organization on campus, can develop a website or an app and bring it up to administration, get their approval, and actually be able to make it available for all students,” he said.

In an email, Rajan wrote that he also intends for Harvy to model a positive use of AI in higher education, and especially at Harvard.

“Generalizable intelligence will have a lasting impact on all forms of work,” Rajan wrote. “I think Harvy serves as an important example for how schools should use AI to streamline processes and help students learn, rather than harm educational outcomes.”

“Harvard has always been a pillar of progress, and I think it’s particularly important for the school to be thoughtful about it now,” he added.

—Staff writer Nina A. Ejindu can be reached at nina.ejindu@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @nina_ejindu.