What happens when a student looks back at two years of documentation and tries to make sense of all of it? In this episode of Story of a Post, we sit down with Alyssa Harger, a landscape architecture student at the University of Kentucky, and her professor Ryan Hargrove, to walk through a portfolio Alyssa built in Unrulr.
If you've followed Ryan's work, this picks up where our University of Kentucky case study left off. That story was about how Ryan brought Unrulr into Studio One to make the "doing, thinking, feeling" process of becoming a designer visible day to day. This one is about what happens next, once a student has two years of that behind her and a way to gather it all in one place.
Alyssa Harger is a second-year landscape architecture student at the University of Kentucky. Ryan Hargrove, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture, has been her instructor for about a year and a half, going back to the year-one design studio, the introductory course where Alyssa first picked up Unrulr. She's carried it forward ever since: into later studios, into different courses, and into her own design work outside of class. As Ryan puts it, it's become less of an assignment for her and more of a lifelong learning tool.
Alyssa's portfolio, Personal Transformation – Landscape Architecture, is organized into three categories: becoming a reflective practitioner, design work progression, and changes in confidence and purpose. (It's public, so you can explore the whole thing for yourself.) Portfolios are a newer addition to Unrulr, and Alyssa's is a fantastic look at what the feature makes possible: a place to pull two years of scattered posts into a single, intentional through-line. Ryan created the template. The three pillars are his framing for how any learner, student or professional, actually grows. From there, Alyssa did the curating, pulling from her own posts to build out each section in her own way.
Here's the part that stunned Ryan. Inside "becoming a reflective practitioner," Alyssa had written her own set of highlights: deep reflection, asking questions, being vulnerable, discovery, looking at things differently, listening and learning. Ryan hadn't assigned a single one of them. "I did not tell her any of those headers," he said. "She made those on her own, but if I was writing my syllabus, those were exactly the ones I would hope students would grow." The learning objectives of his course had surfaced on their own, completely unprompted. "She's a superstar," he added. "But to see it unveiled here, it's all the right things she's focused on."
Walking through the rest, the portfolio opens with a cover page where Alyssa explains what's inside and shares a short video on landscape architecture and how pairing it with Unrulr has helped her grow. The design work progression section holds the brunt of the physical work, her drawings, grouped into highlights like understanding form (learning to actually be in a site and grasp scale), chaos to creativity, sketches to plans, telling stories with graphics, and a whole lot of troubleshooting. The final section, changes in confidence and purpose, traces an arc: the beginning, feeling proud, confronting fear, excitement, trust, inspiration, and purpose.
So how does a portfolio like this come together? A few things made it possible.
A structure to build from. Ryan didn't hand students a blank page. He built a portfolio template around three pillars of growth, then let students curate their own evidence (Unrulr posts) and write their own narratives (highlights) inside it. Enough scaffolding to start, enough freedom to make it theirs.
Teaching that sticks. Ryan teaches in analogies. One that landed for Alyssa was about brackish water, the zone where fresh water meets salt water and everything gets messy. "You have to thrive in this zone," he tells students. "When things start mixing and get messy, you have to want to swim in it." Alyssa took it to heart, and when her own project hit that messy stage, she reflected on it in those exact terms.
Reflection in the moment. Alyssa is honest that, for her, the best reflection happens live, not after the fact. She describes an 11PM night with a deadline closing in, frustrated and stuck, and instead of forcing the work she stopped to ask why she was frustrated and what was actually wrong. Reflecting after the fact loses the richness of being in it. Over time, that habit stopped feeling like something she had to remind herself to do and just became part of how she works.
Building connection and community. Reflection started out feeling like an assignment, but it didn't stay one. As classmates got involved, Unrulr turned into something people were excited to open, commenting on each other's work, reading deep reflections, realizing things about one another they hadn't known. It even connected students who'd never really talked face-to-face.
For Alyssa, building the portfolio was a forcing function. She went back through every post from the past two years, reflected on each one, and grouped them by how she'd grown. Before, it was all jumbled. Pulling it together narrowed and focused it, and helped her understand her own purpose, which she sees as one of the most important things to grasp, in her major and in life. There's reflection in the moment through Unrulr, but you rarely scroll all the way back to the bottom. The portfolio made her do exactly that, one big reflection on everything she'd done and where it had taken her.
For Ryan, the portfolio is a window. As an educator, the first thing he's after is a real relationship with each student, one rooted in who they are, what they're feeling, and where they could go next. Unrulr lets him follow that journey over time and connect with a student's purpose, not just the surface of their work. And it scales: this is one student's portfolio, but every other student has a different journey you can connect with the same way.
When a school in Massachusetts saw Alyssa's portfolio (as an example of amazing student work), they posed the question, "sure, this works for a student like Alyssa, but what about kids who aren't all-in?". Ryan's take was that the entryway doesn't matter. Plenty of students came for the social side first, just enjoying seeing what their classmates were making. Whatever gets them practicing is fine, because with enough practice the growth shows up on its own.
In Ryan's studios, students use Unrulr to document their design work as they go: capturing what they're doing, what they're thinking, and what they're feeling. Then they return to it when it's time to make meaning. Reflection in the moment captures the richness of a struggle while it's still happening; the portfolio is where all those moments get gathered, grouped, and turned into a record of growth. The ideal, Ryan says, is to get to the point where the platform is simply part of how you operate, the way you'd pick up a pencil. Slowing down to reflect helps you understand a problem more deeply, and once you do, you move forward more informed and, ironically, faster.
His bigger point is that design isn't a solo act done alone at a desk. It works best in coordination with others, and Unrulr gives that collaboration a home even outside of class, a synthesis of thought and action that students keep building on together.
Watch the full conversation above to hear Alyssa and Ryan tell it in their own words.
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