How My Alma Mater Fixed the Digital Experience
Before I ran for student body president, I was just another undergraduate navigating the same clunky systems as everyone else.
We had an old student portal that linked out to everything — finances, grades, tuition, schedules, class registration. It felt cumbersome, outdated, obstructive, and everyone complained about it. Yet, the complaints never led anywhere. Frustrations grew so pervasive, they became normalized — and somewhere along the way, the mindset shifted to, “That’s just how the system is, deal with it.”
The Real Cost of Clunky Systems
For me, there are a couple of pain points that stand out. One came through our weekly service hour logging. Every on-campus student must log attendance to track completed service hours. The system was so archaic, it developed into a source of friction — affecting every single student, every week. The next involved one of my friends — someone considering our institution — who got so frustrated trying to navigate the student portal that he nearly abandoned his application altogether.
When frustrations multiply and compound across all the digital touchpoints students navigate (from applying all the way through graduation), the impact becomes overwhelming.
Building a Campus Experience Campaign
Most student government campaigns promise incremental improvements — better dining options, additional parking, improved communication between students and administration. I wanted to promise systemic change, but refused to make commitments I couldn’t deliver.
I felt passionate about providing a better digital campus experience, so I asked the administration directly about the possibility. When I shared the idea of a campus app with Dean Brett Mitchell, he mentioned he’d recently encountered Pathify at a conference in Washington, D.C., and was open to exploring how it might work on our campus. Learning more about Pathify — how it could provide a single platform for all campus resources — gave me something more concrete to include in my campaign. Fast forward a few months — I won the election, and the real work began.
Student President and Institutional Advocate
My official responsibilities as president centered around advocacy — programming, events, keeping tabs on student sentiment, serving as the bridge between the administration and students. But I understood that if we were to catalyze real change, we needed to do more than relay complaints or fix dining hall menus — we needed to build a compelling, data-driven case for a campus platform.
One of the most important contributions included constructing a competitive analysis. I researched peer institutions — schools we compete with for students — and documented their approach to the digital student experience. The report demonstrated concrete examples of universities solving the exact challenges we faced and highlighted opportunities where we could improve or be more competitive.
The schools doing this well had something in common… they all used Pathify.
Armed with that research, I presented these findings independently to our university president and then to our VP and Dean of Enrollment. I didn’t want to complain about what didn’t work, but instead, show them what could work — backed by real examples and inspiration. After a few more months of evaluation and logistics, the college selected Pathify to power its student experience.
Tackling Recruitment and Retention
Bringing on Pathify naturally aligned with some of the college’s institutional priorities, too. Fall 2024 resulted in our largest incoming freshman class since before COVID — an encouraging sign that we’re moving in the right direction (but our enrollment goals remain ambitious!). Pathify also aligned perfectly with why the VP and Dean of Enrollment supported Pathify — because it offered a resource for prospective and incoming students, as well as for current students. It’s a rare solution that addresses multiple strategic initiatives.
What Student Experience Actually Means
For me, the student experience encompasses everything a student goes through on campus — the positive and negative, the tangible and intangible. It’s the relationships you build, the community you find, the feeling that you belong. But the student experience also includes how the institution demonstrates care through accessible resources, technologies and genuine efforts to make students feel heard.
The student body makes our campus so incredibly special — students create the community and shape the atmosphere. In my time as student body president, I wanted the confidence that what makes our campus unique isn’t lost to systems that don’t serve us well. I wanted to shift the culture from accepting “that’s just how it is” to expecting — and building — better.
I’ll never personally experience Pathify (Editor’s note — with the Alumni audience expansion, the Pathify experience doesn’t end at graduation!), but I worked hard for a solution so future generations of students can. If Pathify helps even one student stay engaged instead of dropping out, or prevents one prospective student from abandoning their application out of frustration, then every presentation, every hour spent building the case, was entirely worth it.
About the Author
Lindsey Aarum graduated from Moody Bible Institute in December 2025, where she served as student body president for the 2024-2025 academic year. Her leadership approach — research-driven, strategic and relentlessly student-focused — demonstrates what’s possible when advocacy meets action. Between graduation and her next endeavor, you can find her hunting for vintage treasures and sampling every coffee shop in Chicago.