Student Worker
- Student Assistant- Dean’s Office, Fox School of Business
- Overall, I do many tasks as a student assistant in the Dean’s office. Some average tasks include sorting mail, answering calls, and scanning files. However, I do more substantial projects to support the Dean’s office staff. I primarily work with Amanda B. who knows I am a MIS major and gives me related projects. Most of her job involves using the Fox School’s private system, which I have learned a lot about. I have some ongoing projects and others that are delegated to me at random.
- An ongoing project that I complete is approving requested events in the Fox Events system. Depending on the room and event, I either approve or deny the request. I use the same events system to schedule events like SPO meetings, conferences, or mostly any non-class event that takes place in Alter, Speakman, or 1810. I use our Fox Personnel system to add employee data as needed, especially around the time of the semester employee stipends need to be imported. I use our Fox Schedule system to move, cancel, add dates, or change instructors/times for classes. This system is what allows all Fox classes to be scheduled across all campuses including Ambler and Center City. It is cool that I am able to schedule events and classes that myself and my peers attend. For these projects, Amanda sends me an Excel sheet with all of the data needed which has helped me sharpen my Excel skills and familiarize myself with Pivot Tables as well. I have also completed projects on other outside information systems such as Taleo, Banner, and 25Live.
4. Before advancing further in my coursework, I did not know how the Fox School’s system operates or why it is so important. This system was coded and is maintained by one person (Chuck) at the Fox School, which is crazy to think about as a MIS student. The rest of the university uses different systems than the one we use in Fox. After taking MIS 3502, I realize that there must be a huge and complex API and database operation behind the client side program Amanda, I, and others see. For example, if I was trying to schedule an AIS event at 1:00 in Alter 231 while a class was already scheduled through the Fox scheduler, a conflict message appears and says the request can not be completed. I imagine the server is coded in a way that goes something like…. if event_time == class_time && event_room == class_room… invalid request. I also imagine lots of strategically used HTTP methods to retrieve, delete, or insert data in the database. The client side program is not the most visually appealing or user friendly interface. Sometimes there is blank messages and quirks here and there. However, I understand that for one person designing this, it is a functional yet complex system to have supporting such a large institution. I am looking forward to taking cyber security in my final semester because I can not yet gauge how secure our system really is. 25Live, an event scheduling program, is not yet integrated with Fox’s API. Therefore, when a person schedules a room in Fox through 25Live, it is not added to our database and I add it manually through the Fox events system. The university also uses Ellucian Banner, an ERP system designed for higher education. Although classes are in the Fox Schedule system, I have added them to banner so registering students can view classes. As someone who wants to work in technology consulting one day, I find it very interesting that the Fox School uses so many different systems.