Graduate Program Manager

In Bellingham, Washington, the Western Washington University Computer Science department offers a Masters of Science in Computer Science degree. Their graduate program is unique since it is customizable in nature, while providing an accessible pipeline for WWU Computer Science undergraduates and mid-career professionals to easily pursue and further their education.

At the time that my team was working on the project, an Advisor and a couple of administrative staff within the Computer Science department were  in charge of evaluating the academic progress of their graduate students using an Excel spreadsheet. Since the Master’s program is customizable based on a specific student’s progress, this process ended up being complex, tedious, and time-consuming for all parties involved. With the team having other responsibilities within the Computer Science department, there was never an adequate amount of time to accurately assess student progress or perform outreach duties like answering student questions and advertising the Master’s program to prospective students. 

To ensure that the Computer Science department could provide a higher quality service to all their graduate students, the goal of the Graduate Program Manager project is to help the graduate advising team by streamlining the student evaluation process and to help keep current and prospective graduate students informed when the program increases in size.

Since the application’s software had been in development by previous students, my team and I were tasked with continuing their work by giving a more professional look to its interface, hosting it on departmental servers, and cleaning any coding nuances. After some analysis, I found there to be a huge issue with the current design of the application being developed. It had too large of a scope trying to provide two different services: (1) a website hosting graduate program information and (2) a student evaluation system. This forced me to stop my work and ask “How can this product be more feasible towards its goals”?

As the development team focused on understanding the pre-existing software developed for student evaluations, I took a step back to gain better context and understanding of the project’s goals. By conducting interviews with stakeholders and a heuristic evaluation of online resources readily available to the public, I was able to identify and split user goals of the project into two different personas – staff and students. This helped verify that the scope of the application and project had gotten too large.

With this discovery, I then used my findings to process, reorganize, and prototype the project into two separate components, taking the following into consideration:

1.) To improve the graduate student’s experience of understanding of their status academically, certain information must be readily available. This includes both general questions about advisement, resources from both the Computer Science department and WWU Graduate School, and steady communication between advisor and student.

2.) To make accurate evaluations about student progress, important criteria such as a student’s GPA, status, and number of forms submitted should be visible and readily available.

3.) All aspects of the project must be easily maintained (Graduate Advisor, administrative staff, IT staff, and departmental Webmaster).

Due to the sensitive nature of the information involved in the student evaluation process and with WWU being a public institution, this section will be password-protected. Please reach out to me if you want to learn more about the work I did on this specific portion of the project.