Ithaca College announced the release of myIC, its new student portal, in an Oct. 8 email to the campus community. The new portal reorganizes college resources to be accessible and customizable to students. The portal is accessible via the web or through the myICPortal application on iOS and Android devices.
Students can check their emails, grades, class schedules and assignments through the portal. The portal also includes announcements for events, daily dining hall menus, access to student life and academic resources and links to open DegreeWorks and Homer Connect.
Casey Kendall, deputy chief information officer and associate vice president of applications, said myIC was born out of a discussion with the college’s Student Governance Council in Fall 2023. She said myIC was created as a replacement for apps.ithaca.edu, which is a website that includes a list of links for various resources at the college.
“A lot of students didn’t know if all of those things on apps.ithaca.edu were available to them,” Kendall said. “And they didn’t really have the context about what a lot of the things in there were.”
The portal is customizable, allowing students to add and remove widgets and reorganize their dashboards. Melissa Pittinaro, executive director for Marketing Communications at the college, said myIC was intentionally designed to allow students to tailor their portal to their preferences. She said that having the portal on mobile devices allows students to access college resources at their fingertips.
Kendall said myIC was created using Pathify, a platform that allows colleges to create customizable student portals for the web and mobile devices.
“Students were saying that they would love to have an app that was more comprehensive with all the services that they have at the college and that can be a communication tool as well,” Kendall said.
Pittinaro said the college also chose to use the “IC” name for the portal to complement the branding of the SafeIC mobile safety app, which launched in July. She said a small group of students tested out myIC and provided feedback for it over the summer.
“We want feedback from more users so we can keep building it,” Pittinaro said. “We feel like we have a good 1.0, and the idea is to keep building it and evolving it and making sure that it’s working for folks and that we can add new improvements as needed.”
Graduate student Joshua Wan, a student employee in the Office of Information Technology and Analytics, said he was part of a feedback group for myIC over the summer. He said he wants to see more control over the widgets within the myIC portal.
“So currently you have to find [the widgets] based off of what is provided,” Wan said. “But if we could find more ways to add specific ones … like add a widget that’s like a quick link to something else.”
The portal has been available since the start of Fall 2025, but the college did not begin marketing it until after Oct. 6. Kendall said the college has mainly been doing backend technical work on the portal but is now looking for student feedback.
“We actually have a feedback form within the portal,” Kendall said. “But what we are really looking for is scheduling some focus groups, so there’ll be kind of small deep dive sessions into the portal and getting feedback from students there.”
Pittinaro said IT and Marketing Communications will be meeting with other offices at the college to show them the portal and discuss how their offices can use it to tailor announcements and reminders to students. She said she hopes the portal becomes a tool that students use every day.
“Instead of having a million things bookmarked, they can go log in … to all the portals or the apps that they might be using every day,” Pittinaro said.
Wan said he has heard from many students through his job at IT that resources like apps.ithaca.edu are confusing. He said he hopes students take advantage of the centralized information in the portal.
“I think students will end up seeing however much they want to see,” Wan said. “Obviously, we have a bunch of bulletin boards up around the entirety of the campus. How often do you end up seeing students looking at those though? … I hope that with myIC, as long as one person in a friend group gets it, then they’ll start spreading it around, and eventually it’ll catch on.”
