Looking for a new way to see Northeastern’s campus and get in touch with Admissions?  We have an app for that!  Thanks to Ken McGrady, a current student in the College of Computer and Information Science (CCIS) and Presidential Scholar.

Northeastern’s Office of Undergraduate Admissions recently launched the new “Discover Northeastern” application for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch. Development of the application was led by McGrady, in conjunction with the Enrollment Management and Student Affairs (EMSA) Marketing Communications team.

“Northeastern already has a strong campaign in social media, so the iPhone application is just an added bonus for potential students,” said McGrady. “I think it says a lot when the university hires their own students to do work like this. It shows that the university believes in the education it gives.”

McGrady is currently on co-op in California working for Intuit on their product development team. Working closely with a small team of developers, designers, and project managers, McGrady focuses on the new and exciting products specifically for the iPhone market.

“I pretty much get to work with the cool technology and help Intuit modernize,” said McGrady. “I am an equal on the team, often posing ideas, questions, problems, and solutions in the overall product development.”

As a side project McGrady is also exploring new and innovative ways to work with social networks. Intuit offers an unstructured time system where employees can put 10% of their time into a side project.  McGrady took advantage of this and participated in a 24 hour code-off as well as other innovation workshops. As a result, he developed a proof of concept of his idea on how to work with multiple social networks.

“Because of the progress I have made, I had received a sizable reward. I had to do user research and identify potential pains and frustrations, and tested the proof of concept with customers to see how my idea can solve them,” explained the dual major in Computer Science and Mathematics.  “I have co-workers serving as mentors for me to help me develop the product idea out and extend its reach to higher authorities.”

McGrady is looking into potential patents for the application in order to secure his idea. The patents would be in Intuit's name, but would also showcase McGrady as the inventor.