Role: Experience Manager (fully remote), working with the Founder, Admissions and Instructors.
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The challenge: two international programs running in parallel, one cohort of each at a time, with a student journey spread across admissions, onboarding, content, community and delivery.
What I did: shaped that journey from the first conversation to graduation, built the content strategy around the student experience, and created a shared system so every cohort could run consistently.
What changed: around 200 students across 7 cohorts, 300+ inquiries handled, and an Instagram audience that grew by around 70%.
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Gritnova runs six-month programs for students around the world. During my time there, Sustainable AI for Architecture and International Film Production ran in parallel, with one cohort of each at a time. Over a year and a half, that added up to seven cohorts and around 200 students.
The programs were fully remote, spread across live sessions, Discord, a learning platform and several time zones. But the experience started much earlier than the first class and ended much later than the last one. For Gritnova, the student experience was the product.
My role was to shape that experience from the first conversation with an enrolled student to the moment they graduated, and to build the structure that made it work across every cohort.
Students joined from around the world
While one cohort was finishing and preparing to graduate, we were already getting ready to welcome the next one. Every part of the journey was always happening somewhere: someone was asking about the program, someone was starting, and someone was getting ready for graduation.
Those stages were connected. What people heard before enrolling shaped what they expected from the course. How they started affected how easily they could navigate it. What happened during the program became the stories future students saw online.
So I started looking at admissions, onboarding, content, community and delivery as parts of the same journey.
After an internal change in the team, I also took over admissions. Prospective students often reached out directly by email or DM with questions about tuition, workload, curriculum and what the program could lead to. In that time, I handled more than 300 inquiries and ran 58 admissions interviews.
Those conversations showed me what people were unsure about before deciding to join, and where our communication needed to be clearer.
Once enrolled, students received a three-email onboarding sequence and joined a kickoff session covering how the program worked, where to find things and what was expected of them. Instructors had their own onboarding too, so the people delivering the experience were working from the same expectations.
The programs taught architecture, AI and filmmaking, but the curriculum was only part of what made Gritnova interesting. There was also the international community, access to instructors and industry professionals, the work students were producing, and the fact that an online program eventually brought people together in person.
I built the content strategy around those parts of the experience. Students became a central part of the brand through profiles, testimonials, projects, behind-the-scenes moments and graduation content. Instagram focused on a younger, more visual audience, while LinkedIn played a bigger role in credibility and professional networking.
Between August 2024 and March 2026, Gritnova’s Instagram grew from about 13.7K to 23.3K followers, and the 212 posts I published reached more than 180K accounts.