Abstract
The University of Virginia struggles with a fragmented Contracted Independent Organization (CIO) ecosystem that disadvantages students unevenly, creating an equity problem. Outside of the club fair early in the year, first-generation students rely on informal networks for organization discovery, due to the scattered platforms used in the CIO ecosystem, like Instagram, Discord, GroupMe, and Presence. My STS research identifies the effects of this ripple unequally among the student body. Institutional communication structures, when built poorly, reproduce social capital gaps. My technical project, HoosHub, is a direct response to this threat. HoosHub centralizes CIO discovery and management for UVA students, while my STS research examines how poor structures limit first-generation students’ engagement in the same organizations.
The technical portion of my portfolio was a HoosHub, a project completed by my team of 4. HoosHub is a centralized web-based application where students can create an online profile with their school email address. I used an iterative user outreach approach to ensure the online profiles allowed people to connect. When designing the user profile format, the case we kept going back to was if a first-generation student registers for an event with a new organization, we want to make sure they are able to be personally greeted at the door by name. Using their online profile, students can register for public events on grounds, request to join CIOs, and ask questions to the heads of CIOs. If you are the head of a CIO, you can accept membership requests, answer questions, post events and announcements, and create subgroups within your organization. To create a platform that works for as many CIOs as possible, we added public vs. private features so CIO leaders can control information access. During beta testing, we found that users were able to create an account and find organizations they were interested in easily. CIO leader users also reported feeling in control of their organization and especially liked the ability to create subgroups within the organization. Based on the feedback we received, we concluded that our project could successfully reduce the friction for all students, closing the equity gap in the process of finding and joining an organization at the University of Virginia.
In my STS research, I interviewed first-generation students to examine their experiences in career-oriented organizations on grounds. During this, I used Putnam’s social capital, mostly bridging capital, and Bronfenbrenner's bioecological systems, focusing on the exosystem where institutional policy and structures live. Using Bronfenbrenner’s theory, I found that the first-generation students I talked to have their awareness, access, and confidence form a reinforced cycle directly supported by the communication structure failures created in the exosystem. Using Putnam’s theory, I found that with more loosely defined structures for CIO engagement, the first-generation students I talked to were at a disadvantage because they entered college with less bridging capital within space. This allowed me to reframe low first-generation participation as a design failure within the structure of the institution, rather than individual choice. From this research, I can confidently recommend more structured communication systems within the institution.
My STS research makes HoosHub more than a convenient alternative; it is a working solution to a current equity gap at the University of Virginia. Passive systems are not inherently neutral; they are usually the opposite by upholding structural biases in society. During my time at the University, I have discussed viewing technology within its social context, specifically the advantages and disadvantages of technology. The standardized CIO and user profiles are not a random decision; my groupmates and I designed them this way to reduce the benefit of prior knowledge. Based on the idea that engineering is a form of social experimentation, I believe that when designing systems for development institutions like higher education, engineers owe users who are structurally disadvantaged to ensure the systems they build will contribute to the development of a better society. HoosHub lowers the barrier to building bridging capital for those who do not already possess strong peer networks in the university.
