Freshmen will be greeted by a new online landscape when they log onto their MyUNM account next fall.
The MyUNM Student Experience Suite is projected to replace MyUNM for incoming freshmen students starting in the fall 2020 semester.
The project will incorporate help from various student groups and resources on campus, including the Office of the Provost, the Division for Equity and Inclusion and UNM Information Technologies (IT).
Associate Provost for Student Success Pamela Cheek said the biggest focus is on first-time UNM students because they believe that's the highest need at this point.
"We hope to be able to follow an entering class all the way through their experience and build-out for the student progressively," Cheek said.
Cheek said the MyUNM Student Experience Suite is an effort to more equally distribute University information so everyone has the same opportunity to succeed. She added this is a critical project that will ensure the needs of structurally disadvantaged students get met.
"This is an equity project because we know from international research and research on our own campus that first-generation students, students of color and structurally disadvantaged students have a much harder time accessing services than students who come from families where their parents went to college," Cheek said.
The project is currently in the initial phase of design. UNM IT is partnering with groups of students filtered through Associated Students of the University of New Mexico to help develop how the suite will be laid out.
Alesia Torres, the director of IT Applications, said the department is excited to be able to involve students in the planning and design of the project.
"We don't want to build this off in an island by ourselves somewhere — we need to hear the voices of the individuals who are going to use it," Torres said.
Tuan Bui, an IT manager for the IT Applications development team, said beginning this May, the project will center around what they believe an undergraduate freshman may need.
"What we plan to do is when a freshman undergraduate student logs in, instead of seeing the MyUNM page, they will see the roadmap, essentially what we are building for the fall," Bui said. "The other students will see what we are seeing today."
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Starting in July, the webpage will become more dynamic, and students will be able to switch the order of the roadmap to fit their specific needs.
Torres said one of the biggest challenges for the project is combining all the systems into one system that works best for a student's experience at UNM.
"The biggest hurdle is the integration pieces," Torres said. "We have so many systems that we have to pull the data from and to, to bring this consolidated experience together. That is going to be the big piece to the success of this project."
Amanda Britt is the photo editor at the Daily Lobo. She can be contacted at photoeditor@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @AmandaBritt__
