THE OFFICE OF UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH
Program Development, Management, Research, Mentorship, Social Media
Leveraging my prior experience in project management & marketing, I applied my expertise to restructure programs and team processes with a focus on efficiency. Alongside this, I honed my skills in incorporating equity perspectives into my work, as well as navigating differences between working in institutional and corporate settings.
Read my achievements & contributions while in this position, below:
01. Winning a 50K Grant for Equitable Access to Undergraduate Research
Our department has been nominated for UW's 2023 Class Gift, which provides a grant of $50K to fund a project within our program. Upon being nominated, I drafted a proposal outline and designed a pitch deck, while successfully leading a team of 6, from ideation to the presentation stage within a short period of two days. Our team emerged victorious in a highly competitive field, consisting of six other strong program candidates. Read the proposal outline here.
02. Designing Social Media Posts for $10K in Program Funding
03. Restructuring "Research Cafe": A Monthly Research Networking Event
Research Cafe is a monthly event where students come to chat about research over donuts and coffee to
CHANGE 1: After gathering feedback from multiple research students, I utilized their insights to restructure Research Cafe and implement a Peer Advising model. The results were remarkable, with a 175% increase in event participation and a significant improvement in the experienced-to-beginning research student ratio, which shifted from 1:5 to 2:1. These outcomes demonstrated that our URL's were enthusiastic about embracing the Peer Advising model and sharing their knowledge.
CHANGE 2: Previously, it was difficult for students to identify staff/peer advisors unless they made age-based assumptions. To address this issue, I implemented a simple solution by creating nametags for staff, peer advisors, and recruiters. This change allowed students to easily identify who they could approach for drop-in advising.
04. Restructuring "Research Exposed": a University Course
Uprooted the current design of the program’s research courses, to better fit the needs of early career researchers, increasing student participation by +138% through the use of discussion-based & networking practices by implementing student feedback.
05. Introducing Team Structure & Process
My prior experience in agile project and program management was instrumental in securing my current role. During my first week, I met with all my team members to gather feedback on improving program efficiency. I discovered that team meetings were ineffective and work was disjointed due to decentralized delegation.
Within my first month in this role, I took on leading team meetings and implemented a Kanban framework (Trello) to lead team meetings. I categorized program categories into buckets and assigned tasks/projects within them. Additionally, I incorporated tags to indicate each team member's progress in the process. I streamlined communication by creating Microsoft Teams and channels for each program category, moving all communication to these channels instead of separate chat rooms. These changes improved team satisfaction, collaboration, communication, and efficiency significantly.