Sanket Gohil

As a software engineer and web developer, Sanket is responsible for creating and improving the user experience across numerous DAR websites, a job in which he takes a great deal of pride. 

After working in development and alumni relations at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where he earned his Master of Science in human-computer interaction, Sanket came to Johns Hopkins in 2015 to broaden his higher education qualifications. Previous to that, he was a senior website developer at I.T. Expert Solutions in Bhavnagar, India, the city where he grew up. 

In his spare time, he likes to experiment in the culinary arts, music — he used to play in a band as the keyboardist — and in learning new computer programming languages and technologies. 

What do you do as part of your job that others don’t realize? 

When someone uses a webpage to donate, register for an event, or just to read some information, what they see is a page. But what they don’t see are the many things meticulously put together behind the scenes to display it. Creating a great page, or user interface, requires training, research, and thorough testing to determine the colors, font-sizes, element locations, page layouts, flow, and more. But for most, it’s just a page! 

What accomplishment are you most proud of? 

In 2015, I implemented DAR’s first Drupal 8 content management system for alumni.jhu.edu, which only a handful of companies were using in the month after its launch. Learning something that is new to the entire world is thrilling. I have persistently looked to improve our platforms with new technologies ever since. 

Tell us something we don’t know about you. 

Since the age of 10, I have won city, state, and national drawing competitions. My father owned a TV news channel when I was young. I grew up around newsrooms and cameras, and was introduced to video production there. I wrote, directed, and edited a short film as an undergraduate at Saurashtra University in Rajkot, India, which caught the attention of local newspapers, news channels, and radio stations.