Executive Summary:
The A. James Clark School of Engineering’s Undergraduate Advising & Academic Support Office (UA&AS) tasked DQU Consulting with evaluating and discovering any potential problems with the current process students take to obtain information in the external transfer process. The team was encouraged to focus on the experience of the user and the transfer advisor with an emphasis on the website and other outreach communication methods to make it more user-friendly and more streamlined for students.

To gain insight into the current process of information flow, the team conducted interviews with students who have gone through the external transfer process successfully as well as stakeholders on the other end of the process such as the transfer advisor. Furthermore, a survey was sent to past transfer students to get a quantitative grasp of the process. The team also performed benchmarking research to see how other organizations communicate transfer information.

The current communication process for the transfer process is not specifically defined. The students start the process in different ways; through word of mouth, searches on search engines (e.g., Google, Yahoo, etc.), information session(s), community college advisor(s), and the A. James Clark Transfer Website. When approaching the project, the team worked to recognize the challenges stakeholders found on both ends of the communication of the external transfer process. Some of these challenges included students often over utilizing the transfer advisor as a resource and underusing the website because they struggled with using it. The transfer advisor found themselves having to repeat individual information that should be found on the website as well as the consideration that students will be led to the website through different means. Taking these into account, the team developed recommendations.

The DQU Consulting team devised multiple recommendations for UA&AS. The first of which is to generate online visual walkthroughs which navigates transfer students in an interactive manner to find and understand necessary transfer information. The second recommendation is external transfer community development which will ensure students feel welcomed and are able to ask questions to peers that have been through the process or are currently going through the same transfer process. The final recommendation is a feedback survey which will allow the UA&AS staff to monitor how well information is being received by students.

After implementing these recommendations, the DQU Consulting team predicts a more uniform understanding of transfer information. In the new process, the online visuals should help students feel more empowered at the beginning of their transfer journey. The second recommendation will then help students feel more involved and lead to a deeper understanding of the university through the dialogue that occurs in the transfer community. Next, the recommendations will allow staff to be able to deliver more personalized assistance to students before they finally apply to the university.

This project shows my ability to provide value to an organization through expertise and traditional consulting methods, which I want to exemplify to recruiters as it relates directly to my goal of going into strategy consulting. A recruiter can see the methodlogy I followed in the 'Approach' section, which involved the traditional skill of interviewing. Additionally, this serves as a work sample of mine when it comes to process improvement.