Career & Alumni Platform

An alumni and career services office is not a website. It is the relationship layer a university keeps with its graduates for the rest of their lives, and the channel through which current students meet employers.

BRAC University runs that function through OCSAR, and OCSAR needed it to work as a system rather than as a folder of spreadsheets and an overflowing inbox.

• Fragmented alumni records. Records were scattered across departmental lists and legacy data, with no way for a graduate to keep their own record current.
• Email-driven ID cards. Card requests arrived by email, often with photos that failed print requirements, creating repeated manual back and forth.
• Paper-like elections. Alumni association elections relied on circulated PDFs and emailed nominations, with no structured record of phases, positions, or candidates.
• Ad hoc career advising. Advising was booked over phone and email against no shared calendar, producing both double bookings and empty slots.
• Manual events and campaigns. Reunions and campaigns were rebuilt from scratch, while registration and contributions were tracked by hand.
• Centralized publishing dependency. Routine updates such as notices, events, and job posts required tickets to BRACU’s central web team.

RSI Lab built the OCSAR platform on Drupal, as a section of BRAC University’s wider institutional site. Reusing the university’s Drupal stack meant shared login, shared theming, and shared publishing conventions from day one. The OCSAR site is part of BRACU, not a lookalike bolted on beside it.

The platform is a set of custom Drupal modules, each replacing a specific manual workflow while sharing identity, data, payment infrastructure, permissions, and the wider BRACU design system.

1. Alumni Identity and Self-Service

A guided onboarding flow lets graduates activate an account and maintain their own profile, backed by campaign banners that drive registration. This becomes the foundation for every other module: one identity, one profile record, kept current by the person it belongs to.

2. Alumni ID Card Module

A purpose-built module handles application, fee payment, and issuance end to end. The form guides applicants through formal passport-style photo requirements using an inline SVG example and explicit acceptance rules, and a live SVG card preview shows exactly what will be printed. Both steps prevent rejected submissions before they reach staff.

3. Alumni Election Hub

Elections are modeled as structured entities, elections, positions, and candidates, rather than as documents. The public hub shows a horizontal timeline of phases, candidate profiles, and organized nomination and voting information. A candidacy-fee gate is enforced through the platform’s payment integration before an application can proceed.

4. Appointment Management System

A React 18 and TypeScript application, built with Vite and embedded inside Drupal, lets students and alumni book counselling and advising slots with OCSAR staff. FullCalendar powers the calendar surface, with toolbar controls, staff-side slot management, and the complete booking workflow. The application talks to Drupal through a REST layer.

5. Events and Campaigns

Reusable event microsite patterns allow campaigns to be assembled rather than rebuilt. The RS Alumni Picnic 2027 Silver Jubilee page, for example, carries a hero, contribution tiers, phased registration, payment details, quick links, and contacts, and was refined through successive client change requests.

6. Career Services

Job and internship listings, employer engagement, and placement-support surfaces connect current students and alumni with opportunities through the same identity used across the platform.

Platform Architecture and Engineering

One payment integration, reused everywhere. SSLCommerz is integrated once, with server-side validation, IPN handling, and a per-transaction log. Shared configuration is read by the ID card and election modules, so ID card fees, candidacy fees, and event contributions all use the same verified payment path.

React inside Drupal without a rewrite. The appointment UI is a modern React 18, TypeScript, and Vite build packaged as a Drupal plugin. Drupal owns identity, data, and routing. React owns calendar interaction. The two layers stay deliberately separated.

SVG as a document format. ID cards are generated by injecting values into an SVG template, which gives a pixel-accurate live browser preview and a print-ready artifact from the same source.

Role-scoped publishing. OCSAR permissions are scoped to their own content types, so the team publishes events, campaigns, jobs, and notices directly, without central IT intervention.

Shared Platform Benefits

• Unified identity. Students and alumni use one account across profile, appointments, elections, ID cards, and career services.
• Drupal-native integration. OCSAR remains part of the wider BRAC University platform, keeping content, navigation, theming, and publishing conventions consistent.
• Mobile-first experience. Core workflows are designed for the phone-first behavior of students and alumni.
• Role-based editorial access. OCSAR staff publish approved events, campaigns, job posts, and notices without relying on central IT for routine changes.
• Reusable campaign model. Established event and campaign patterns make future reunions, drives, and initiatives faster to launch and easier to maintain.
• Bilingual-ready. English is the primary language, with Bangla content supported where the audience requires it.

• Multiple custom modules delivered on a single platform, integrated with BRACU’s main Drupal site and its login.
• Alumni ID card application, payment, and issuance are fully online. The guided photo flow measurably reduced rejected submissions and the staff time spent correcting them.
• The alumni association election moved from PDFs and email into one structured hub with a public timeline and candidate profiles.
• Advising appointments are booked against a shared calendar, ending email scheduling and double booking.
• Event registration, contribution tiers, and payments are handled on the event page instead of in spreadsheets.
• OCSAR staff publish routine content themselves, without raising central IT tickets.
• Alumni-facing touchpoints carry a consistent BRACU brand and a single sign-on.

The value of the OCSAR platform is not the number of pages it contains. It is the operating layer it gives the university for maintaining lifelong alumni relationships and creating practical career connections: from data collection to self-maintained profiles, from inbox workflows to self-service, from disconnected tools to one ecosystem, and from IT dependency to team autonomy.