Elevating the Student Voice

The website wasn't answering the questions students actually carried. Choosing a graduate program means betting on your own future, and you can't make that bet until you picture yourself inside it. So they looked elsewhere, putting questions to Reddit and Google: "is the program actually good for research?", "what's grad student life really like?", "are the PhD students happy?" Program facts only reach so far. What a prospective student wants is someone who has already lived it. That search maps onto a long, high-stakes journey, from early coursework and entrance-exam prep through shadowing hours, research, and applications. At every step the official site answered in institutional copy, while the reassurance students were after sat 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• What the site gave them: staged photography, generic marketing copy, outdated profile pages, isolated "student life" sections, none of it candid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

The deeper problem is tone. The site reads like an institution talking at you, official and polished and a little corporate. A prospective student trying to picture daily life here has to dig for it. The pieces of a real story do exist, scattered and buried across a sea of official pages, from financial aid and admissions to curriculum, location, and faculty access. Anything human, a student's perspective or sense of growth, takes real effort to surface. The result is distance. You can learn the requirements and the tuition long before you hear a word about what being there actually feels like.

• 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 were leaving the site to find real voices, so I brought the voices back to them, woven into the program pages, the PhD directory, and the homepage, right where someone weighs whether this place is for them. The mechanism is a single content entry. An editor writes one student's story once, and the CMS relates it to whatever format the page calls for. A tight layout takes a quote. A page with room runs the full feature. A cohort composes several students into one tabbed block. Write it once, reuse it anywhere: that is what lets the pattern scale across 250+ programs without an editor rewriting a word, and why a human voice can finally reach the pages that decide enrollment. This mattered most to the people who would run it. The content team was small, split across the clinical and education sites, and clinical work, urgent and patient-facing, swallowed most of every week. Education copy lived on whatever time was left. Write-once was built for exactly that squeeze, one entry reused across 250+ program pages, the directory, and the homepage, with no page-by-page rewriting. On a rough projection, the model was designed to claw back 60 to 80 editorial hours a content cycle, time the team never had to spare.

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.

Those widgets needed a home, and the Student Perspectives page was the obvious place to start. It listed a handful of students as walls of essay text, three or four screens per person, with one small photo and nothing to anchor a quick scan. You had to commit to reading before you even knew whose story it was. The redesign turns that page into a feed. Each student gets a card with a photo, name and program, a short preview, and a link into the full story. One Perspectives Feed widget powers all of it, so adding a student takes a single content entry rather than 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.

One level up, the PhD directory had the same problem. It opened on a dense "Why Choose Rochester?" block and a long program list, then buried award recipients in paragraphs at the bottom. You had to wade through the institution before reaching 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 turns into a scannable card, and a Student Spotlight lands in the main navigation, making student voice a first-class destination instead of a footnote. It is the same content the directory always held, reorganized so people can 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.

With the deeper pages fixed, one move was left: the front door. Most prospective students land first on the School of Medicine homepage, which opened on a centennial banner and a dean's portrait, institution before people. The redesign keeps the credibility markers and 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. Here the toolkit reaches full stretch, the same student entries written for the program pages now surfacing 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.