From pinning vests to programming websites, information systems (IS) students at the BYU Marriott School of Business worked with a local nonprofit to expand its community outreach and help people experiencing homelessness stay warm in the winter.
When students reach the end of their first semester in the IS program, they participate in INTEX, a 4-day exercise that gives students an opportunity to apply their acquired skills in a real-world setting. An associate chair and professor in the IS department, Greg Anderson, says that this year, the department decided to pair INTEX with serving a nonprofit organization to benefit the community. “I'm a big believer of how service can change lives,” Anderson says.
IS faculty members invited Jen Spencer to talk to students about founding the Turtle Shelter Project. Having experienced homelessness herself, Spencer shared how she witnessed seven friends freeze to death during the winter. To help prevent this tragedy from happening to others, volunteers and employees at Spencer’s organization make vests with foam clothing technology so individuals struggling with homelessness can stay warm amid freezing temperatures.
However, the nonprofit needed help with organizing data. “In the past, the Turtle Shelter Project only had little spiral notebooks, and the people in the organization were trying to maintain all the data related to their service projects just by writing it all down,” Anderson says. With that need in mind, the IS student teams built 60 different website prototypes, designed with features to help the Turtle Shelter Project manage service projects, volunteers, and team members.
But before starting on their websites, students sought to better understand the organization they would be working with by pinning collars that go into the Turtle Shelter Project vests. “We had all 240 students in the program work on a service project for an hour so that they could understand what the service events are all about,” says Ryan Schuetzler, an associate professor of information systems.
Tasked with improving the functionality and design of the Turtle Shelter Project website, each student worked 20 to 40 hours with their teams over the four-day period. While reflecting on those hours of designing websites, information systems senior Kate Lytle from Thousand Oaks, California, says she felt the impact of using her skills to serve. “It was really beautiful to do the INTEX project because it shows how technology can be used to help people.”
After the prototypes were finished, Spencer reviewed the websites to determine which features would be ideal for the Turtle Shelter Project. “Watching students build something that's actually going to help an organization is wonderful,” Schuetzler says. “They lit up when they were presenting their projects. Watching Jen's response as she saw and was thrilled by what we presented was awesome.”
Hoping to help Spencer go from prototypes to a working site, the department tasked students to take the feedback from Spencer and continue building a full website.
The project was only a few days long, but Anderson says he hopes students will use these experiences to influence how they approach their careers. “We should look at everybody as being a son or daughter of our Heavenly Father and deserving of something good in their life, even if it's a vest to keep them warm in the winter.”