This is the Admissions Guide, for anyone outside the university — someone deciding whether to apply, part-way through an application, or newly accepted and wondering what happens next. It is public: no account is needed to read it.

Two other guides sit next to it, and it is worth knowing which is which:

• the University Guide at /guide — how the academic system itself works: the Level 0–10 ladder, marks, credits, heralds and badges, the honorary levels, and how to read a Cortex ID. Public too;
• the Student Guide — the day-to-day book for people who already have an account. It is linked from your own menu once you sign in.

The short version

1. Create an account and verify your email (and phone, where asked).
2. Browse the catalogue and apply to a programme you are eligible for.
3. Wait for a decision. A professor or an administrator reviews it.
4. Enrol — pay where the programme is priced, then the coursework unlocks.

Each step is explained below. Nothing here costs anything until step 4, and the catalogue is readable before you commit to anything.

Ready now? Create an account — or read on first.

Finding the right programme

The catalogue lists every programme rung the university offers, grouped by its Level 0–10 position. That is a lot to read end to end, so two tools sit on top of it. Neither needs an account, and neither needs JavaScript — with scripting off they are ordinary forms that reload the page.

Filter and sort

At the top of the catalogue is a panel that narrows the list by six things at once:

Filter	What it means
Discipline	The path family — AI, security, cryptography, finance, and so on.
Degree type	MSc, Ph.D, the post-doctoral stages, or a Level-1 bootcamp.
Level	The Level 0–10 position, which is also the entry requirement.
Length	Up to 2 months · 2–6 · 6–12 · over 12. A programme with no fixed term (Stage Ω, for instance) is not placed in a bucket, because its length is unknown rather than long.
Enrolment	Whether applications are open right now.
Content language	English, or English and Spanish. A programme appears under Spanish available only once its mirror has actually landed.

Each option shows how many programmes it would leave, so you can see what a choice costs before you make it. Sorting — by name, by length, or by credits — happens inside each level, so the ladder from Level 0 upward is never scrambled.

Every filter is in the address bar, which means a narrowed catalogue is a link you can send to someone.

Compare side by side

Tick Compare on up to four programme cards and press Compare selected. The comparison puts them in one table, one row per fact: degree type, level, discipline, length, taught units, credits, price, prerequisites, what you earn, content language, whether enrolment is open, and who teaches it — with the Apply button on each column.

Every figure in that table is the same figure its catalogue card shows; the page reads one record, not two. There is deliberately no "study hours" row: the university does not publish an hours estimate, and length in weeks plus the credit total are the workload facts actually on record.

What this university is

Cortex University teaches security, systems and cryptography through programmes built as phases: reading, laboratory work, quizzes and an exam per phase, with a capstone at the end of the longer formats. Marks are computed from the work you submit — they are not awarded by hand.

Completing a programme issues a verifiable credential: a certificate whose authenticity anyone can check at https://www.cortex-university.com/verify, without an account and without contacting us.

Languages

Course content is authored in English. The portal interface is available in English and Spanish, and you can switch at any time from the header. Some programmes carry a Spanish mirror; the catalogue marks each one honestly, so you always know before you apply.

The two visual registers

The style control in the nav switches between Classic and Modern, and it is a separate axis from light/dark — both registers work in both themes.

• Classic — the university as a printed prospectus, circa 1890: cream laid paper, Oxford-blue ink with an oxblood second ink, gold on the arms only, Roman inscriptional capitals for anything engraved and a Garamond for anything read. Square corners, hairline rules, no glow and no motion. The heraldry is the traditional set throughout — the engraved achievement, the classic heralds and badges, the wax seals — never a modern mark. /old is a drawn sketch of it, and /old/enable puts the whole portal into it in one click.
• Modern — the CRT-green brand look: the neon-cyan heraldry, the hex grade gems, the vault at the login door.

Which register you get before you touch the control

You are not shown a coin toss. The portal picks one for you, and the first rule that matches wins:

1. Your own choice. Once you have used the style control, your lynx_ui cookie decides, on every page, for a year. It outranks everything below — including the operator switch — so nothing the university does to its own defaults can quietly overrule you.
2. Who you are. Signed in as CEO or an administrator, you get Modern — those are the consoles the brand look was built for. Everyone else — students, professors, and every visitor who has not signed in — gets Classic.
3. Modern, if neither applied.

So the public face of Cortex University is the printed prospectus. That is a deliberate promise rather than a default: what you see before you apply is what you get after you enrol.

Every login page is Classic, including the staff doors, because nobody is signed in yet when they see one. The register never depends on which URL you asked for — only on who you are — which is deliberate: the login page must look the same at a real door as at an address nobody has ever routed, so that probing for private doors tells you nothing. Sign in as CEO or an administrator and the portal switches to Modern once you are through.

The preference lives in the lynx_ui cookie (plus localStorage for instant re-skin), so it survives sessions and is resolved server-side on first paint. An unknown or tampered value silently falls back — it can never leave you on a half-painted page.

Gamification is never hidden by a register. Hiding it would create a second content model to maintain forever, and the two would drift. XP, standing and crests are present in both; Classic simply strikes them as engraved marks instead of neon ones. Both registers also keep WCAG AA contrast — period authenticity stops where legibility starts.

Retired: the Traditional register. A third register — a plain 2003-style department page, system serif and boxed tables — is no longer offered by the style control. Nothing about it was deleted, so a browser still carrying the old preference simply gets the default instead of a broken page, and it can be brought back in one line if it is ever wanted again.