Onboard UGA

Onboard UGA was created through the New Media Institutes Capstone course. As the NMI’s final course, students are given a particular client and deliver a new product or make improvements to an existing project that will aid their designated client with an issue. Having UGA’s freshmen board as our official client was close to home but also much different from the usual client. Working closely with the New Media Institutes Chris Gerlach, five 2020 female graduates designed a website with freshmen in mind. Onboard UGA is a new digital platform made for first year students to improve their freshmen experience. Rather a student is a newly admitted high school senior, a fall or spring admit or transfer student, Onboard UGA covers an array of bases.

We strive to inform, innovate and improve the overall freshmen experience. From personal experiences and feedback from faculty who work closely with first year students, the first few months at UGA can be overwhelming. It’s a new environment, information can be found in several different places and with over 37,000 students and 600 student organizations there can potentially be a lengthy adjustment period. This is where Onboard UGA comes in.

Through weeks of research, meetings with freshmen focus groups, surveying, tabling and seeing what other large SEC schools have implemented we discovered and picked apart the most confusing pieces of campus to adapt to. Some of our subsets we detail are: tips from upperclassmen, financial aid information, the breakdown of days and times dining halls are in operation and simple class hacks a new student wouldn’t know unless someone told them so.