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76 Changing the Face of Student Employment in IT at the University of Rochester
Janak
Gada, University of Rochester
Jason Wagner, University of Rochester
Student employees are the lifeblood of many IT
organizations, and we often invest a lot of time, energy and resources to
ensure their success and ours. Academic
Technology Services at the University of Rochester employs over 140 students
across many of its divisions such as public labs, information center, computer
store, and more. Until now, student
employees in each area were independently administered by their area manager.
This separation of student employees in each area had
many disadvantages. Mainly, there was a
lot of redundancy and duplication of efforts.
Also, students who worked for small areas did not have flexibility in
scheduling, finding shift coverage or options for training. The small area also suffered due to lack of
sufficient shift coverage and often needed to provide significant training to
students.
Beginning with the 2000-2001 academic year, Academic
Technology Services will be combining all of its student employees into one
large work force. Two full time staff
members will oversee the daily operations while all the managers who have
student employees will participate in a team to define the overall goals of the
program with respect to their areas.
The main components of the student employment program that we hope to
address are payroll, scheduling, consistency in policies, centralized
supervision, and wider training for all staff.
This presentation will focus on the different aspects of student employment, and all the factors that must be considered when combining multiple groups into one larger group. We will illustrate the format that we are developing and the role of each person in the overall scheme. Finally, we will discuss the benefits and challenges to both Academic Technology Services and its student employees.