When I began working with NYU SPS, I couldn't have imagined how much I would enjoy interviewing its faculty members, writing spotlight stories, and building pages on the back end of the new website. For over a year, I poured my heart into this project, spending countless hours doing outreach, writing, and editing. Now that the new SPS website is live, I'm pleased to share it with you!

Every great project has a clear step-by-step process, and I was thrilled that the team at NYU had a clear vision for the new website.

On the old SPS website, there was already an extensive library of spotlight stories on faculty, students, and alumni. However, many of these stories were simply copy-and-pasted Q&As that didn't align with the university's vision for the new site. The existing Q&As lacked a clear story and didn't leverage a person's experience to entice prospective students to explore the school's programs.

I took stale Q&As and reworked them into engaging stories.

Here's a before and after:

Emily Johnson's Spotlight Story Before:

And after:

Once I completed the rewriting of old spotlight stories, it was time to begin writing new ones. I reached out via email to over 300 students, faculty, and alumni for their spotlight stories. This involved creating tailored Q&As, scheduling and conducting interviews, transcribing answers, and following up for more information when needed. Simultaneously, I wrote the spotlight stories from beginning to end using each person's Q&A or interview transcript.

During this process, I was also tasked with sourcing photos for each spotlight story, placing them in Google Drive folders, and writing alt text for each one. I used Asana to communicate each step of this process with my team.

I'll admit: I had never used AEM in my life before this project. I learned everything from scratch, eventually getting my footing and uploading the stories I wrote onto the platform. I used content blocks to migrate each section of the stories onto AEM, uploading the photos and filling out the metadata on the back end.

With hundreds of these stories under my belt, there are a few that I feel particularly proud of. Some of these were written from interviews I conducted with faculty members, while others are inspiring stories of students and alumni who are doing amazing things at NYU and beyond.