Case study · Admissions portal & ticketing
Supporting 1,000 applicants a year.
GO-ARAL is the application and ticketing portal at the National Graduate Office for the Health Sciences (NGOHS), University of the Philippines Manila, built alongside the DRMS admissions records system, supporting roughly 1,000 graduate applicants annually and around 200 support requests monthly.
NGOHS coordinates graduate admissions for the health sciences at UP Manila, a process that concentrates roughly a thousand applicants into recurring admission cycles, each generating applications, records, and a steady stream of support questions.
Handling that volume without dedicated systems means records living in ad-hoc files and support arriving through unstructured channels, with no way to track what has been answered, resolved, or dropped.
Two systems, designed to work together.
GO-ARAL
The applicant-facing application and ticketing portal, where graduate applicants apply and where their support requests become tracked tickets instead of lost emails.
DRMS
The records system for graduate admissions, the office's internal source of truth for applicant records.
I architected the APIs, database schemas, reporting systems, and role-based access control behind both, and led deployment to a VPS, staff training, and post-deployment support.
Admissions records, reporting, and applicant support now run through structured, role-controlled software instead of manual channels.
GO-ARAL and DRMS were where the pattern that now defines my institutional work took shape: architect the APIs and schemas first, treat access control as a first-class design concern, own the deployment, and stay through training and post-deployment support. That same pattern later scaled up into SURI, the university-wide research information system.
Written by Ruther Bergonia, Software Systems Architect & Senior Full-Stack Engineer, Metro Manila. I built GO-ARAL and DRMS as Senior ICT Assistant at NGOHS, UP Manila (2021–2025). More about me.
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