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- Current MIT students interested in internships and post-degree employment opportunities
- MIT alumni that want to help current students choose their careers
Personas
Some stereotyped users that will drive the site.
Irene the internship seeker
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After Alan graduated he went on to a quick succession of jobs none of which he found very satisfying and wants to share his experiences about each one with current students. He has since settled into a lucrative position where he is happy and has free time to give advice to inquisitive youngsters. He doesn't mind being contacted through email and will calmly and graciously take the time to respond to banal requests such as "Do you work long hours?" or "I have never lived in NYC. Where should I try and find apartments if I want to be close to the financial district?"
Representative Users
Our user interviews illustrated that there are is a general lack of understanding of what resources are available to current students and how to utilize them in an intelligent way. One of our users have never tried to use the CareerBridge because they found them superfluous and confusing. Conversely, an alumnus had signed up to use InfiniteConnection but had never actively used it as no current undergraduate had contacted him through email. Neither of the undergraduates were aware that InfiniteConnection existed.
When we discussed the option of a single portal that could effectively handle the tasks of searching for interviews, reading comments on position postings and connecting with individuals currently employed in those positions versus the hodgepodge of websites currently in use they were almost unanimously in favor of the former. User AA found himself repeatedly bouncing between MIT-sanctioned and google search results in an attempt to cobble together enough information to make an informed choice. He commented that finding this information in one portal would make finding an internship significantly faster than his current practices allowed.
Below is more explicit data about the interviews that we performed:
User KE
User Description
KE is a current junior in computer science interested in epidemiology and network analysis. KE does not currently use CareerBridge to manage her interviews. In fact she has yet to begin searching for formal interviews or career advice as she enjoys academic research and prefers to email a professor directly to initiate contact. She is a new user to employment aid tools.
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Upon asking her to attempt to use CareerBridge(for the first time) to find a position that she might be interested in Katie was able to navigate to the site and create an account.
Upon logging in she wasn't sure that she had been successful as the title bar still showed options to log in(pictured above). The main page had changed and that led her to believe that it was successful, but she thought that it was silly that after she logged in as a student she could log in as an employer.
As she tried to search for things related to epidemiology and networks she was frustrated that she couldn't specify these interests in a keyword search. After spending about 30 seconds deciding whether she should carefully enter values for all of the fields she gave up and selected "Sciences" in the Industry field and clicked search.
Only 14 results appeared on the first tab. The text fields at the top of the columns caused some confusion as she tried entering various search terms and hitting enter to trigger search before realizing that the button next to the text field was tied to the field and you had to select the type of filter you wanted.
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AA is a freshman looking for his first summer internship position. He has heard about a number of companies but he doesn't have much information on these companies. He also doesn't know what people in his field of study have done for summer internships in the past. AA is a course 9 major and hasn't found anyone one in his living group in the same major. He is still taking general institute requirement classes and is also having difficulty finding an upperclassman in her major.
Session Notes
AA goes to the company websites and he only finds self-generated company descriptions. He has done extensive research on Google but he is having trouble filtering through the copious amounts of reviews to find the ones that suit his needs.
He goes to goes to Careerbridge CareerBridge to find out more about his desired positions but find company generated job descriptions. AA doesn't trust these descriptions because he thinks companies would always say positive things about themselves in order to attract more candidates.
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