The Tufts University Prison Initiative of the Tisch College of Civic Life

During my sophomore year at Tufts I continued my work with JumboCode as a member of the TUPIT team. The summer prior, I thought I would stretch my neck out a bit and apply for the Tech Lead position because I enjoyed my experience on the Animal Aid team so much the year before. To my continued surprise, one of the Project Managers that year wanted to see what I could do and took my on as their Tech Lead. I worked very closely with them and the client to architect a website that fit their needs, all while performing code reviews for our developers and implementing some features of my own. You can find the final codebase here.

Our goal

The Tufts University Prison Initiative of the Tisch College of Civic Life (TUPIT) is a program which allows incarcerated and formerly incarcerated individuals to pursue higher education while behind bars and while returning to society. TUPIT runs a number of different programs. Its degree program teaches a cohort of students from MCI-Concord and allows individuals to pursue a bachelor's degree while behind bars. The MyTERN program provides resources and courses to returning citizens which work towards a Civic Studies certificate. And the Inside-Out program provides a credit-bearing course for incarcerated people at MCI-Shirley, Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center, and MCI-Concord.

For years, TUPIT kept track of students' information, schedules, past courses, and degree requirements in Google Sheets. This simply was not scalable past ~50 students. As much as we wish Google Sheets was the ultimate data platform, TUPIT needed software which can manage a large number of students and track their potentially complex degree tracts. My team built a site which allows the TUPIT staff to store, search, and modify student information in a scalable way. The site allows for the creation of courses, degrees, and degree requirements which can then be effortlessly audited against student progress. The flexible program we developed is now being used to track student progress for TUPIT's various programs.

My work

I worked closely with the project manager to ensure that the project was on track and that the team was working effectively. Together we created tickets for our developers and assigned them to suit their strengths and goals. We also communicated regularly with the client to ensure that the project was meeting their needs; it was not uncommon for their needs to change and for us to redesign parts of the website! I was also responsible for reviewing code and giving helpful feedback to our developers.

When I had extra time, I even implemented some features of my own. I built the authentication system that all of our developers could utilize for their components. I also worked on a number of the frontend components, including the many of the student editing and data visualization components. On the backend, I wrote the much of the degree audit code which determined whether a student had fulfilled various degree requirements.

Each week I would review the code that my team had written and provide feedback on how to improve it. I would also field any technical questions that my team had, and reach out to the club's Head of Engineering if the issue was too mighty for me alone.