My sophomore spring I worked with MIT students, professors, and administrators in a committee to evaluate the first year experience at MIT. In two design spirals, we modeled the undergraduate freshman year experience at MIT as a system in order to explore different frameworks and solutions for the Institute’s key decisions.
the research
Throughout the project, I reviewed MIT’s freshman advising system. In the first design spiral, I worked with another student to study Freshman Learning Communities (FLCs), an alternative to traditional advising in which a small number of students take the same seminars and form close relationships with professors that share their interests. Through literature research about the history of FLCs at MIT, as well as extensive interviews with FLC students, alumni, lecturers, and directors, we compiled a needs assessment in the form of a paper.
I created an interactive presentation in place of a PowerPoint to present our findings. In “The Game of MIT,” participants were asked to pick a player (a fictional freshman going through the experience of an FLC.) The participants then followed their player’s journey throughout the year, experiences the highlights and pain points of their player. The narratives of the players were created to display a diversity in potential experiences while remaining true to the stories of the students we interviewed.
The Game of MIT helped the administrators and professors who attended our presentation empathize with students in FLCs. Participants were also encouraged to leave anonymous feedback and contributions via post-it notes, generating conversation and ideas for future work.
the proposal
In spiral 2, I worked in a team of ten to survey traditional advising at MIT and propose improvements. We created storyboards of different advising experiences and tested them among focus groups, collecting quantitative data to inform our designs. At the end of the semester, our proposal was presented in an assembly of over 100 attendees, including MIT’s Vice Chancellor.
