Elevating the Student Voice

Students were looking for answers the website wasn't providing. Choosing a graduate program is a decision about someone's future. Students need to visualize themselves in the program to know it's worth it. So they went elsewhere, searching Reddit and Google with questions like "is the program actually good for research?", "what's grad student life really like?", and "are the PhD students happy?" Program facts only go so far. What they really want is someone who's already lived it. This behavior maps onto a long, high-stakes journey: early coursework, entrance-exam prep, shadowing hours, research, applications. At every step the official site answered with institutional copy, while the real reassurance lived on third-party forums.

• What students wanted: honest program experiences, mentorship insight, non-traditional student paths, career outcomes, candid daily life
• What the site gave them: staged photography, generic marketing copy, outdated profile pages, isolated "student life" sections, none of it candid
• Where they actually went: Reddit threads, Google searches, peer institutions, anywhere with a real voice

Here's the deeper problem. The site reads like an institution talking at you: official, polished, a little corporate. A prospective student trying to picture their actual life here has to dig for it. The pieces of a real student's story do exist, but they sit scattered and buried across a sea of official pages: financial aid, admissions, curriculum, location, faculty access. Anything human, like student perspectives or personal growth, takes real effort to find. So getting to know a student feels disconnected. You can learn the requirements and the tuition long before you ever hear what it's actually like to be there.

• Official pages provide relevant information, but student perspectives and personal growth sit nested deep and easy to miss, so the student rarely feels connected to a person.

Students kept leaving the site to find real voices. So I brought the voices to them. Not on one buried "student life" page, but woven into the program pages, the PhD directory, and the homepage, right where someone is weighing whether this place is for them. Here's what makes it work. Every widget pulls from a single content entry. An editor writes one student's story once. The CMS then relates that content to whatever format the page calls for. Tight layout? Drop in a quote. Room to breathe? Run the full feature. Showcasing a cohort? Compose several students into one tabbed block. Write the story once. Reuse it anywhere. That's what lets the pattern scale across 250+ programs without an editor rewriting a word, and it's why a human voice can finally show up on the pages that decide enrollment.

Quote widget

The lightest touch: a pull quote, a photo, a name and role. Low effort for an editor, high human signal for a reader. Drop it onto a dense program page when you want a moment of real connection without breaking the flow.

Featured story, light

A full card: headline, body, photo, and a call to action. This is for pages that can carry more weight, like an enrollment landing page or a program overview, where one student's story earns its own space.

Featured story, solid color

Same content as the light card, bolder surface. Built for the homepage and high-visibility spots where the layout needs contrast and the story needs to stop the scroll.

Tabbed multi-student

One block, several students, switchable by tab. Made for cohorts and award recipients, anywhere the community matters more than a single face. Each student stays their own entry; the page just composes them together.

The widgets needed a home. The Student Perspectives page was the obvious first one to fix. It listed a handful of students as walls of essay text, three or four screens of it per person, with one small photo and nothing to anchor a quick scan. A prospective student had to commit to reading before they knew whose story it even was. The redesign turns that page into a feed. Each student gets a card: photo, name and program, a short preview, and a link into the full story. The same Perspectives Feed widget powers it, so adding a student is one content entry, not a hand-built page.

• Every student is visible at a glance instead of buried below the fold.
• Photo-forward cards put a face to each name and make the page feel human.
• A short preview replaces the wall of text, so readers choose what to open.
• Pagination scales the list cleanly as more students are added.
• One widget, one entry per student: no more bespoke page layouts.

Old → New: the Student Perspectives page.

Before

Before: a few students as full-length essays, dense and hard to scan.

After

After: a scannable, photo-forward feed with previews and pagination.

The PhD directory had the same problem one level up. It led with a dense "Why Choose Rochester?" block and a long list of programs, then buried award recipients in paragraphs at the bottom. A prospective student had to read through the institution before they found a single program, let alone a person. The redesign rebuilds the page around discovery. A short intro and a "Why Choose Us?" video set the tone, every program becomes a scannable card, and a Student Spotlight entry point lands in the main navigation so student voice is a first-class destination, not a footnote. Same content the directory already had, organized so people can actually find their way in.

• Programs become scannable two-column cards instead of a dense link list.
• A Student Spotlight entry joins the main nav, making student voice a top-level destination.
• A short intro and a "Why Choose Us?" video replace the wall of opening copy.
• Related links and financial aid get clear, separated entry points.
• The Student Spotlight pulls from the same widget entries written elsewhere.

Old → New: the PhD directory.

Before

Before: a dense intro and a long program list, with student stories buried at the bottom.

After

After: scannable program cards, a video intro, and a Student Spotlight in the nav.

The deeper pages were fixed. The last move was the front door. The School of Medicine homepage is where most prospective students arrive first, and it opened on a centennial banner and a dean's portrait, institution before people. The redesign keeps the credibility markers but makes room for the students. "Inside the Trainee Experience" features a real graduate, a quote widget carries her voice, and the research funding and faculty numbers still anchor the page. This is the toolkit at full reach: the same student entries written for the program pages, now surfaced on the page that sees the most eyes, with no extra authoring.

• A featured "Inside the Trainee Experience" story puts a real graduate on the homepage.
• A quote widget carries the student's voice alongside the institutional stats.
• Program entry points stay scannable as cards, not link lists.
• Credibility markers (research funding, people in research, faculty) still anchor the page.
• Every student element reuses entries already written for the program pages.

Old → New: the School of Medicine homepage.

Before

Before: a centennial banner and a dean's portrait, institution first.

After

After: a featured trainee story and student quote sharing the page with the stats.