At A Glance
Roles/Skills:
Tools:
Introduction
Student Innovators is a student organization I founded during my Master’s program at the University of Texas at Dallas. I had a vision to increase student engagement at UTD, and our mission was to connect our campus community through collaboration so that we could create awesome things.
Earlier, I had done some research and discovered that over 41% of college students were underemployed and 58% of recent graduates are unhappy with their job. I believed that the best way to remedy this was to address the problem while students were in college by helping them be more engaged and connected with their campus through student organizations.
Initially, I was able to recruit a group of 5 undergraduate students, some of whom I was already familiar with, to help me in starting this new student organization and to chase after the organization's vision.
Work
Survey Time: Gathering Data
Our previous research and discovered that over 41% of college students were underemployed and 58% of recent graduates are unhappy with their job. However, we needed to gain additional insight into our school: was there an underlying need of more engagement specifically at UTD? Was there a solution that we can tailor to our campus community that addresses any potential issues?
We created a survey to help answer these questions containing both quantitative and qualitative prompts, with the quantitative questions revolving around student engagement and school organizations, while also asking students to write about their typical day at school, their ideal day at school, and their hobbies and interests.
Creating Personas
From our surveys and our research, we gained a lot of great information about the general student body at UTD. Using the data collected from our research, we decided to create eight different personas that embody the students that would be our "target" market.
Each persona had their own names, major, year, interests and hobbies, styles, etc, and were based upon the data that we had gathered from our surveys. We were confident that in a way these personas represented a large body of the student population at UTD, and so we could use them to help make decisions for the organization.
Making Decisions Based on Evidence
Using our newly created personas along with the evidence we collected, we begun to brainstorm ideas on how to use it to benefit our mission. We knew that we wanted to create some sort of tool or product that would reach the students at UTD, and so we decided to use our data to help categorize different interests of different students into two things: Groups and Labs.
Groups would serve as the "Connect" part of our mission, and we split up Groups into eight categories: Academics & Business, Sports & Fitness, Music & Arts, Tech & Gaming, Design & Creative, Health & Wellness, Culture & Beliefs, and Social & Causes. We were intentional to ensure that existing student organizations would be able to fit into one of these groups. Labs would further the "Collaborate and Create" arm of our mission, and we decided to create six Labs: Media Lab, Design Lab, Startup Lab, Data Lab, Music Lab, and Event Lab.
Building A Product
Now that we had adequately defined the constraints of what the tool/product we wanted to build, we came up with the idea to build a CMS web app that served as a directory for students to find, explore, and join a student organization as well as giving them a way to discover events relevant to that specific group and/or their specific interests.
Because much of the team were undergrad students with limited experience, I wanted this to be as much of a learning experience as a building and collaboration experience. In many ways, I believe the constraints of the team’s limited skill set actually caused us to be more innovative and creative in our approach.
Building this product was started in Figma: I had the team create low-fidelity wireframes and over time we worked our way up to successfully build a functional CMS web app using Webflow CMS. We populated all content fields with Lorem Ipsum placeholder text, and the app was ready to be populated with all the information of our partnered student organizations at UTD.
Conclusion
Because of the pandemic, almost all school person events and student organization functions were put on hold, and it made it difficult to continue our vision, especially after much of our team graduated in 2020. That being said, the experience of going through the entire process from ideation to hypothesis testing to creation was invaluable, and left me with a ton of memories to learn from and be grateful for.
Although SI didn’t grow into the vision that I had hoped it would be, we accomplished so much as a team in such a short amount of time. The fact that even just for a few projects, from the CMS web app to hosting events like the Student Startup Fair and Karaoke at the Plinth, the vision was realized on a small scale is something I’m really proud of.
