Syllabi → Semester Calendar (with App Deadlines)
Five syllabi. Forty-something dates. Plus the application deadlines you keep meaning to track.
One short session with Claude on day one of the semester turns five PDFs into one calendar. A second pass layers in your application deadlines. After that the syllabi go in the drawer, the application portals stop being separate to-do lists, and you live off the calendar. The rest of Module 8 builds on top of this single move.
What Module 8 is for
Modules 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 taught you how to do school well with AI. Module 8 builds a system for schedules, money, group projects, overwhelm spirals, and the bigger calls. Six lessons. The framing: AI is at its absolute best when there's a pile of unstructured stuff (syllabi, leases, spending statements, group-chat fights, application deadlines) that needs to become one organized thing.
The unified-calendar prompt: paste this on day one of every semester.
Open a fresh Claude chat. Drag every syllabus PDF into it. Then paste this prompt below them.
Why the table format matters
You're going to feed this output into the next step (the .ics file) and into the Sunday Reset (Lesson 8.2) and into your group-project planning (8.3) and into your scheduled tasks (Module 9, eventually). A clean dated table is the universal input. A wall of prose isn't. Spend the extra time making Claude format it right and the rest of your semester benefits.
Verify, then convert to a calendar file you can actually import.
Two moves before this calendar lives anywhere. First: spot-check. Second: convert.
Step 1 · The quick spot-check
Pick the heaviest item from each syllabus: the final, the term paper, the big presentation. Open the actual syllabus PDF. Confirm the date and weight match what Claude pulled. If the heaviest items are right, the small ones almost certainly are too.
What you're looking for: mistyped dates ("10/3" vs "10/13"), missed items, weight errors.
Step 2 · The .ics conversion prompt
Once the table is verified, ask Claude to convert it to a real calendar file your phone can read. The prompt below does exactly that.
Copy the output, paste into a plain text editor, save as semester.ics. Double-click → it imports into Apple Calendar, Google Calendar, or Outlook.
The application-deadline layer: same calendar, more dates.
If you're a senior applying to college, a junior planning to apply, or anyone hunting internships and scholarships: your academic calendar is only half your real calendar. The other half is application portals: Common App, Coalition, scholarship sites, FAFSA, internship listings, recommender deadlines, fee waivers. They all have deadlines. None of them are on your syllabus.
Same prompt pattern, second pass. Run this after you have the syllabus calendar verified: paste it into the same chat so Claude can merge the two into one combined master table.
Where this fits: and the Pro shortcut for later.
You now have a unified calendar in your phone, your laptop, and your watch. Every other lesson in Module 8 plugs into this one calendar.
What this calendar unlocks across Module 8
- 8.2 Sunday Reset + Schedule Layers: your time-blocking lives on top of these dated items. The Sunday Reset reads the next 7 days off this calendar. Sports, club meetings, and work get layered on top.
- 8.3 Group Projects: when you build a 3-week project timeline, you anchor it to the due date already in the calendar.
- 8.5 Brain Dump → Triaged List: when the week feels unworkable, the calendar is the source of truth for what's actually due.
- Module 9 Scheduled Tasks (Pro): the "Pre-Exam Watch" and "App-Deadline Watch" automations read off the dated items in this calendar to nudge you 5 / 3 / 1 days before each deadline.
Have Claude Pro and the Coach Project from Module 7?
Drop the Day-One Calendar Prompt and the App-Deadline Layer Prompt into your Coach context as calendar-prompts.md. From then on, every new semester you say "run my day-one calendar from these syllabi" and Claude already knows the format.
If you're on Pro and have set up scheduled tasks (Module 9), the application-deadline layer also feeds the App-Deadline Watch automation that nudges you 14, 7, and 1 days before a hard deadline.
Up next: 8.2: Time-Block + Sunday Reset + Schedule Layers
Now that the calendar exists, the next move is figuring out when you'll actually do any of it. We'll build a real time-block template (classes + study + work + sleep + life), add the Sunday Reset, and layer in the stuff that's not on any syllabus: sports practice, club meetings, work, the activity log that pays off in app season. This is the workflow that ends "I have so much to do I don't know where to start."
Continue to 8.2:Sunday Reset + Schedule Layers →