Westmont Magazine CATLab Blazes New Trails for Summer 2021

Bytes from the CATLab Magazine

The Project: myWestmont

After a year of hard work and quiet preparation, CATLab announced our next big project, our new team and the theme for the summer in May 2021.

Since CATLab began in 2018, our students have successfully revamped both the advancement and admissions offices at Westmont, centralizing all their tools and data into a unified, efficient system within Salesforce.

This summer, our goal was even more complex. We created myWestmont, a single, easy-to-use portal to meet all the online needs of both students and staff members. This platform helps students with everything from checking their chapel attendance to applying for ministries to registering for classes.

“This is going to be a multi-year project, with countless apps and forms to rewrite, but we will take it one form at a time with the care and experience that CATLab students can readily provide,” said Zak Landrum, our director. In the meantime, we could build the foundations of the portal, which Zak described as “a beautiful central train station to give Westmont staff and students the 21st century experience they deserve.”

The Cohort: 16 Developers and Seven Creative/Operations Staff

More than 60 percent of our workers this summer were new to CATLab, making this our biggest cohort yet at 23 students. Sixteen developers on three teams tackled a wide range of projects for the school. The programmers created Salesforce components — think of individual trains within the station that accomplish specific tasks and provide information. The analysts focus on data: entering it, visualizing it in reports, and making sure it gets used well. Finally, the form builders did just what their title describes: building the forms needed to help Westmont operate.

Seven students on the creative/operations team documented the process and shared the lessons we learned during the summer. Alexa Gatiss, a new team member, especially looked forward to learning technical skills and platforms such as Salesforce and Marketing Cloud while creating emails and designing this year’s magazine. For the first time, CATlab staff worked with individual departments on campus to help them transition to the new technology being built.

The Theme: Cultivating Community

With a new summer comes a new theme. We were thrilled to be back together in person. As pandemic restrictions loosened, we engaged more with each other, with people from Westmont and with the wider Santa Barbara community. “I was all online last year, so even though I’ve worked with everyone for a year, it’s crazy coming in and actually meeting people for the first time,” says John Panos, a returning developer.

As always, CATLab leans on our three core values of authenticity, curiosity and commitment. Authenticity provides the basis for community. We’re responsible both to represent ourselves accurately and to reach out to others in ways that encourage them to share genuinely. We can also build community through curiosity: coming up with creative questions to get to know each other or testing out different ways to navigate being a hybrid team with some fully remote members. Finally, cultivating community requires commitment. Once we plant the seeds of a relationship, we have to tend and maintain them, even if this work may vary with the different seasons. As CATLab looked ahead to this summer with our thrilling project, amazing teammates and inspiring theme, we couldn’t wait to get started!

This fall, the college launched myWestmont, the new portal for the campus community. Professors, staff members and students are learning how to navigate it and appreciate signing in just once to get their email, look up someone in the directory and use many other apps on the website.