Stack

Reimagining Academic Growth as a Living System

Designing a cross-role growth ecosystem that transforms student experiences into personalized signals across students, counselors, and families.

Role

Co-Design Lead · Systems Architect

Team

5

Timeline

Jan 25 - Jul 25

The Challenge

Academic planning focused on course selection, while student growth happens across people, contexts, and time.

Through research with 150+ students and stakeholder sessions with parents and faculty, we found that planning felt fragmented across classrooms, counseling sessions, extracurriculars, and home conversations.

The real problem wasn’t tracking credits. It was connecting growth signals across the school ecosystem.

Outcomes & Impact

Instead of designing a standalone app, we architected a cross-role growth system embedded into existing workflows.

• Students

  Students manage evolving journeys through a web-based reflection platform

• Counselors

  Counselors access an expert dashboard to guide conversations with structured data text goes here

• Parents + Teachers

  Parents and teachers receive automated email-based growth summaries to reduce friction by meeting them where they already communicate

This ecosystem thinking ensured the experience scaled across stakeholders without requiring behavioral overhauls.

The Solution

Turning Experiences Into Growth Signals

STACK shifts academic planning from static course selection to a living system that connects students, counselors, and families around evolving identity and growth signals, not grades.

I led the interaction architecture and designed key system behaviors, including:

• Low-Friction Reflection Cards

  Students rate experiences and write short blurbs inline to minimize cognitive effort. Each card becomes a growth node.

• Pattern & Affinity Views

  Experiences cluster visually to surface emerging interests across time.

• Narrative Timeline

  Academic and extracurricular milestones form a dynamic growth map.

• Personalized Opportunity Matching

  Interest signals inform future recommendations, closing the loop between reflection and action.

Instead of starting with the big question, who will you become, our solution nudges the students in the direction their actions naturally point towards.