UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — With almost 11 months of planning and preparation, Penn State Homecoming returns this week with a full slate of activities. With tens and hundreds of thousands of users expected to visit the website during Homecoming week, Homecoming Director of Technology Josh Bauer and his team — which includes a number of his fellow students in the College of Information Sciences and Technology — has been working to manage site traffic and ensure users can navigate the site smoothly.
“I look at a lot of issues in the technology department, especially over the summer because it’s kind of lying dormant. Right now, it’s a lot of web development, a lot of making changes,” said Bauer, a senior majoring in cybersecurity analytics and operations in the College of IST.
Bauer, who previously served as a Homecoming captain before becoming a director, said that his current role is providing him with critical leadership experience through his oversight of the technology committee and leading his team’s contributions to the overall organization.
“Being a tech director means that it’s a piece in a much larger kind of organization,” Bauer said. “Having this responsibility and being able to help and contribute in such a large capacity to achieve something so amazing, like the Homecoming parade and the Homecoming game that we all look forward to every year, is something that I’m going to take away from this.”
Bauer said he has implemented some changes since starting in his role, such as the addition of the UI/UX development captain position to promote representation.
“I knew that the College of IST has a human-centered design and development major, which is tailor-made for UI/UX design, so I wanted to kind of implement that and find some amazing talent,” Bauer said. “And I did with Ryan Dawson.”
A senior studying human-centered design and development, Dawson is one of the captains that Bauer oversees. Dawson said his responsibility is to understand what users need and redesign site components to align with their needs.
“Through my time in the classroom, I’ve become familiar with UI/UX design principles such as providing user feedback and how to effectively format a page,” Dawson said. “Homecoming has given me the opportunity to apply these principles in a project-based setting.”
As a change-of-campus student who recently came to University Park from Penn State Brandywine, Dawson said he hopes to gain new connections as well as experiences at Homecoming.
“I haven’t had as much time to get familiar with Homecoming as many of my peers,” he said. “For this year’s Homecoming, I’m excited about the spectacle of it.”
Ethan Lemin, a second-year student majoring in cybersecurity operations and analytics, is a systems administrator captain that works alongside Bauer and Dawson. Lemin said the technology committee spearheads developing new programs to assist with the Homecoming agenda.
“My specific role is responsible for ensuring the site’s reliability, including performing updates, creating backups of the site, and conducting security assessments of the website,” he said.
Lemin said the knowledge and skills he learned in the classroom have greatly assisted him with his position in Homecoming, specifically updating the PHP file to avoid site crashes that require using a Linux terminal.
“One skill I’ve been able to use for my position is knowing the Linux terminal, which I gained during my CYBER 100 class and currently SRA 221 and CYBER 262. [This has] allowed me to understand Linux commands and know how to navigate through directories, files and more [as I work on the Homecoming site],” he said. “The knowledge I gained from these classes has allowed me to be successful in my position as the systems administrator.”
Anna Elder and Zhennan “Peter” Wu are also IST students who serve as captains on the technology committee. Wu is a third-year student majoring in data sciences and serves on the special projects team. Wu said his most recent accomplishment was adding a countdown clock on the Homecoming website by using the Elementor plugin. He looks forward to improving technology for Homecoming activities throughout the year.
“I am excited about all the events,” Wu said, “[such as] the Allen Street Jam, THON, FTG Talent Show, and so on.”’
Wu said IST classes have offered him useful skills that are applicable in a lot of his work.
“I feel great when I solve problems using the experience I learned from the courses,” he said.
Elder is a third-year student majoring in security and risk analysis. She is a web developer for this year’s Homecoming.
“What that means is that if one of the captains for another committee needs something changed or added to the website, I’m generally the one to take care of it,” she said.
Elder said she has applied the skills learned in the classroom to some degree in her position.
“The most practical knowledge that I’ve brought from the classroom is a good basic knowledge of the web and some coding experience, which helps when looking at the backend of a website even if it’s in WordPress,” Elder said.
The collective skillsets of students pursuing different majors in the College of IST have blended to make an impact for a major, University-wide initiative, according to Bauer.
“One of our captains has been redesigning our website, and our systems admin captain has been making some effective changes to our back end and researching plugins to help mitigate the risk of malware and phishing attacks,” Bauer said. “These are just two examples, but it just goes to show that bringing in students with new perspectives and new skill sets can benefit an entire community.”