Streamlining the Scholarship Awarding Process

Project Sponsor

• Emanuel Pollack, Interim Vice Provost for Undergraduate Affairs

Project Team

• Nikita Chheda
• Marie Khan
• Melissa Oskielunas
• Barb Roche
• Deidre Rush
• Malathi Tamilarasu

Project Leads

• Cynthia Herrera-Lindstrom
• Beth Powers

Project Objectives

Scholarships for UIC students have been administered in colleges and units across campus with distinct application systems. This de-centralization made finding and applying for awards confusing for students and required a great amount of IT effort in many units to create secure, FERPA compliant applications. This project will centralize the application process, thus making it easier for students to find and apply for UIC scholarships. Simultaneously, unit IT staff will be relieved of the construction and maintenance of the application processes, thus reducing their time on this task 100%. In the first stage, scholarship information will be gathered from each department and loaded into the system. Scholarship administrators will be guided on fine tuning their awards in the system, and they will reach agreement on data from Banner to be shared with the system to facilitate decision-making.  Beta testing will be conducted. When the application goes live, it will be publicized as a resource to students.  Additional modifications will be made after the system is live to facilitate payments and to find ways to accommodate scholarships for incoming students.