MHIRT.com: SDSU Scholarship Website
Company Details
The MHIRT scholarship is a scholarship available to minority students whose groups are not largely represented in the public health, behavioral health, and social sciences reseach fields, as well as students with disadvantaged backgrounds. The MHIRT scholarship is funded by the Minority Health and Health Disparities International Research Training (MHIRT) program and allows students to travel to international locations in the summer and take part in real world research training to help them successfully complete their graduate and undergraduate requirements as well as expose them to global health issues affecting groups from a health disparity background.
My Project Responsibilities:
- User Interface Design
- WordPress Implementation and Maintenance
- Domain and Hosting Set-up
- Gravity Forms Implementation and Styling
- Elementor Page Building
- Custom HTML/CSS
Project Scope
At the inception of this project, the scope of the website was to help the program director move away from all the paper applications that students were turning in. They also wanted to simplify the application itself and make it possible to answer additional questions, dependent of how the original question asked, conditional logic. I was also tasked with letting professors know when a student added them as a reference, so they can then fill out a form of their own asking about the student’s educational performance. In the second redesign of the website, I was also tasked with adding a personal blogging component to the student’s overseas including giving them the ability to upload photos and to profile the previous MHIRT recipients.
Project Solution
Since this whole project was a huge undertaking, essentially taking a college program from traditional paper to putting everything online, I had to break this project down into smaller bite sized pieces and start working on the project from its very bare bones web foundation, including helping the Program Director get the domain, set-up hosting and installing the WordPress CMS.
When the project began, I decided to go with WordPress, even though at the start of the project it still wasn’t widely used but it worked perfectly with the Gravity Forms plug-in I researched and it accomplished exactly what the Program Director was requesting. It turns out deciding on WordPress helped out in the future because the second program director wanted to add more blog features, including photo journals of the students who were currently participating in the program abroad.
Once the platform was decided on, I started creating the design and found the Elementor page builder to quickly build out the website. Special requests and features that were requested and the builder wasn’t capable of doing, I custom wrote in HTML/CSS and some very basic JavaScript. Later when WordPress was getting more popular, I reinforced it with security, kept maintaining it and helped out with a bit of custom front-end work to make sure it kept operating at optimal performance.
MHIRT is a great program and I truly believed in its mission and the many students it helped propel to that next level of their education, but unfortunately it was shuttered this year. I will never forget the great people I met and seeing this program through from conception to completion.
