CUNYFirst, which stands for Fully Integrated Resources and Services Tool, is a newly designed online base school system for the City University of New York. You have access to various actions such as enrollment, registration, transcripts, advisement, and financial aid. Before CUNYFirst was designed, a more simplistic website was used labeled E-Sims. It was a straightforward approach to accessing all the information you may need in your collegiate life. You can still use E-Sims today to check archived grades and financial aid given and past tuition payments, but there is one major thing you cannot do, register for classes.

The main focus of any online base school system is to eliminate the traffic in the physical school campus. It is more logical to have students register for classes in the comfort of their own household and on their own time. Rather than having a line of 500 students out the door, which you have been waiting in for an hour and a half. The main resource we used is the CUNYFirst website itself. It is still a fairly new system, so we agreed that the best information about the web based school system would be the website.

Aside from the main actions, the website was created to do: enroll, register, check grades, check financial aid and viewing your unofficial transcript. However there is a main flaw. CUNYFirst does not give a clear and precise explanation on how to perform these actions. Like many other websites, CUNYFirst does include a help page. The only problem is the help page isn’t helpful. The process provided to complete any action you choose to do is not 100% accurate, and does not always work.

For example, registering for the winter semester. On the CUNYFirst help page the general process states that you need to go to student center page, followed by the enroll page, and when you reach the enroll page there is a option to choose which semester you want to enroll in. That procedure does not lead you to enrolling in the winter semester. What do you do when you go looking for help on a website, and the website’s own help page doesn’t help you?

Another resource we used to generate our proposal was a petition started on change.org by a student who is currently using the CUNYFirst system. The website change.org is the world’s largest petition platform with over 45 million users. As of today it has reached 250 signatures. Compared to how many students are enrolled in the City University of New York that isn’t a lot but it is enough to get a general idea of why must people do not like CUNYFirst. The main reason that

most people listed with their signature is that is difficult to navigate, as well as down for maintenance frequently. On our end we are able to rectify one of these reasons, navigation. Our website seeks out to make CUNYFirst navigation an easier process.

From our research and findings, we decided we should create a better-detailed help website for students about CUNYFirst. A website that includes more accurate procedures than what is already provided by the college.  Since we, the students, are usually the ones trying to accomplish these actions, we believe we are better suited for the answers, giving step by step instructions by students, for students. This is where the creation of CUNYFirst 101 comes in!

CUNYFirst 101 is a information resource for students currently enrolled or were once enrolled in a City University of New York who need a step by step guide on how to navigate the CUNYFirst website and to have the knowledge of where everything is located. Students who use the site regularly should be the ones explaining how it works. The original help page for CUNYFirst was created with the assumption that students already have prior knowledge or training on how to use this new City University of New York system. Our information resource will help you figure out what to do on CUNYFirst from the beginning. Starting with a simple task such as claiming for your CUNYFirst account all the way to being able to download your unofficial transcript to get a basic idea of your GPA and to observe your progression as a student at any CUNY college.