Information Technology Services Intern Reimagines Design of UK Student Portal

Sarah Redmon, a senior majoring in Information Communication Technology, recently worked on a new design for the student portal myUK. Redmon accomplished this project as part of her internship with UK Information Technology Services (UK ITS) Enterprise Applications Product Development and Integration Services team that focused on web design, coding and web development.  

The internship was an academic requirement of her major, but it also helped solidify Redmond’s future career goals. 

“I definitely want to become a web designer and developer because I find it to be very interesting and fun,” Redmon said. 

She worked closely with the UK ITS Enterprise Application Product Development and Integration (PDI) Services team, which designs and builds software products for the University including web and mobile applications.  

Smitha Chopra is the UK ITS Enterprise Application Product Development and Integration Director. Chopra said the team wanted Redmon’s internship to prepare her with real-world experience in a supportive environment.  

 “It should be a safe environment where she can ask us any questions at any time and not feel like that's a question she shouldn't have asked.” Chopra said. 

Additionally, UK ITS Enterprise Application Product Development and Integration Services team members Retta Ritchie and Darren Powers worked with Redmon and provided her with day-to-day support.  

Ritchie is the User Experience lead and works on user design and research for Enterprise Applications. She said Redmon’s internship was unique because it focused on user experience and development.  

“That made the project kind of fun for us because we got to walk through the whole (project) from beginning to end,” Ritchie said. “I would talk about what the user experience would be like for a project and what that would look like.” 

Powers, is a Software Developer on the PDI team, discussed coding and design topics as they related to the structural pieces of Redmond’s project. He assisted Redmon with coding. 

“She was interested in both the coding and the design, so we worked on rooting her project in user experience, data, architectural pieces, and then on my end, (there) was a very specific front-end user interface focus.” 

Powers said Redmon began with a basic coding project.  

“The Hello World project assessed where she was at coming into the internship,” Powers said. “It is really interesting to look at the first project that she did, and just a few weeks later, the final work product.” 

For Redmon’s final deliverable, she created and developed her vision of myUK navigation and content organization after receiving data from Ritchie.  

“We had done a content audit, so I handed that over to Redmon,” Ritchie said. Then Ritchie asked Redmon how she would reorganize the data, rename it and the specific steps she would take to accomplish those tasks.  

Redmon took that information, organized and created a new layout for myUK with a user-friendly appearance in mind. Redmon enjoyed her project — especially when it came to working out the bugs. 

“I liked going through and debugging the code that I built, figuring out all the issues and solving them,” she said. “It’s really challenging and fun to me whenever I get to do that.” 

Redmon’s final project impressed the team members. 

“The sophistication of her coding skills and the thought processes improved throughout the internship,” Powers said.  

Ritchie says Redmon’s internship provided work experience necessary for a career in web design and development.  

“She got the full experience of what it’s like to design a project and then how you actually build it,” Ritchie said. 

Redmon valued her internship experience and learning from the UK ITS team. 

“It's really cool to see the finished product that I created,” Redmon said.