Project Lead
Business Strategy Developer
Business Strategy Developer
Business Strategy Developer
UI Designer
Co-Founder of Groupsource
Co-Founder of Groupsource
Groupsource aims to increase accessibility to opportunities that prepare students for the workforce. Through an open-to-all platform, students can connect with companies via semester-long projects, eliminating typical barriers to involvement like inexperience, limited campus organizations, and competitiveness.
Our team had the pleasure of partnering with Groupsource, a company and platform founded by James Hamilton and Riley Campbell. Both James and Riley served as our mentors throughout the design process. Former ICB members themselves, they helped us stay on course when defining deliverables, discussing business models, and prototyping the platform.
It is difficult for students in college to build a skillset and project portfolio in a field they are interested in without involvement in highly selective campus clubs or pre-established networking connections.
across a diverse range of majors, looking for real-world experiences that will prepare them for careers
Our solution to the problem was two-fold: to address the needs of our main student users, we built a prototype of a web platform; to better illustrate the exact relationship between students and mentors, we came up with a detailed business model.
While the Pilot Program explored both mentor and student perspectives, we chose to focus on the student use cases for our high fidelity mockups of the platform.
Case 1: Searching for projects
Users can explore projects by filtering by area of study, time span, industry, etc.
Users can save projects they like, which will then be stored in their dashboard.
Case 2: Creating an account
In order to save a project, users must create an account.
We collaborated with the strategy team to identify the key information we would want from students.
Case 3: Personalized dashboard: Searching for projects
Once a user creates an account, they gain a dashboard.
The dashboard includes a profile to organize past experiences and skills,
a place to see saved projects and choose which to apply to,
and a place to store ongoing projects.
The Pilot Program is what our team pictured to be the first version of mentor-student engagement
to be used on the Groupsource platform.
In preparing this deliverable, our Strategy Team considered various aspects of the interaction:
Student goals:
what was important for students to have before going in and what were their goals for the project?
Mentor requirements:
what kind of learning plan could mentors create in order to help students achieve their learning goals?
Project definition:
how would mentors structure their project so that both project goals and learning goals were met?
Amongst all the previous factors and considerations, an integral component of the Strategy Team's goals was to ideate the Pilot Program experience, which was achieved through Business Process Flow Charts (BPFCs).
We scaled the charts to a ten-week project timeline, throughout which students have weekly check-ins to make sure their learning goals are being met. Based on this, project mentors and Groupsource will work together to adjust the curriculum on a dynamic basis as the timeline progresses.
