On Thursday night, freshman Teresa Paul was busily tapping away at the keyboard of computer 28 in the Kimmel computer cluster.

Paul tried to take her computer into the new Kimmel Computing and Media Services satellite support center three separate times, but was turned away on each occasion.

‘When I came down to Kimmel’s computer cluster, I was told there were 40 laptops ahead of mine,’ Paul said. ‘There was not an adequate staff to take care of the mountain of laptops behind the counter.’

Although Paul’s computer was eventually admitted for repairs, her situation is not unique. The opening of CMS’s satellite computer-support centers has created problems for CMS, with fewer than half the necessary number of student consultants, which has led to backups similar to Paul’s.

CMS’s inability to hire new students to replace those who graduated last year has resulted in a shortage of 35 student consultants, forcing CMS to temporary discontinue most services at its central location in Hinds Hall.

The cause of this understaffing can be traced back to last spring, said June Quackenbush, information technology manager of Student Computing Services.

CMS normally hires and trains new student consultants in April for the upcoming academic year. But last spring CMS was preoccupied with reorganizing for the new satellite support centers and was unable to find time to hire any new student consultants, Quackenbush said. It is now left with only 25 of the 65 students required to adequately sustain all of CMS’s support centers.

To address the immediate problem of understaffing, CMS has been forced to use their professional consultants from Hinds Hall to fill the new satellite support centers.

Yet even after taking this measure, according to Deborah Nosky, manager of client services and information, some of the centers still fall short of the two consultants needed at each satellite location.

To make matters worse, CMS tries to avoid making student consultants work more than the typical 10 to 15 hours a week – something it needed to do before classes started to help deal with the shortage.

‘Once the academic year begins we do not like to stress our students like this,’ Nosky said.

The satellite support centers are open from 2 p.m. to 10 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. Friday and Saturday, and can be found in Brockway, Graham and Lawrinson Halls as well as the Goldstein Student Center on South Campus.

The new locations were chosen because of their existing computer clusters. CMS also maintains older support centers in Hinds Hall and Kimmel Hall.

CMS created the new centers to ease accessibility for students, Quackenbush said.

‘We were making everyone come out to where we are and it seemed to make more sense to be where our students are,’ Quackenbush said.

The opening of the new locations should prove especially convenient for those far removed from Hinds Hall, Nosky said. Prior to the new satellite locations, some students had to carry their desktop computers up and down the Mount Olympus steps, Nosky said, something that wasn’t good for the computer or for the student.

‘We didn’t do this as a cost-cutting measure,’ Nosky said, ‘that’s for sure.’

In an effort to remedy the staff shortage problem, CMS is busily training 28 prospective student consultants over the next two weeks. The CMS training program had to be adjusted as a result of the opening of the new satellite support centers.

‘With two locations it was much more supervised,’ Quackenbush said. ‘Now we need to have our students be much more responsible, and there is a training component to that. We appreciate that people are being patient with us, but we will offer a better service when we get up to full staff.’

Published on September 9, 2004 at 12:00 pm