Service Learning Event:UTI Open House
Event: UTI Open House
Date: February 10th, 2007
The UTI open house event is held quarterly and is an opportunity for UTI to introduce themselves to prospective students, and provide some fun and excitement for current students and staff. The first quarter open house was held on February 10th, 2007 and featured informational booths for the various manufacturer specific training programs, application stations for new students to apply, and training breakout sessions to introduce people to life at UTI.
For this service learning event, I worked with the admissions departments to help them with prospective student applications. The prospective student application is fully electronic, and the admissions department had set up twelve computers for prospective students to apply with. In addition to the new student application, financial aid forms, subject pretests and entrance exams were also administered in electronic format. I volunteered to help assist the prospective students as they worked through these forms electronically, which was a big help because the other admissions staff, for the most part was busy interacting with parents.
Most of the new applicants were still in high school or had recently graduated and for some it was pretty obvious that they had limited experience working with computers. It also seemed that the students from minority groups required more assistance in navigating the software, where as the Caucasian students seemed to move through the forms quickly and seemed more comfortable in navigating on their own. Most of the applications I felt were pretty straightforward, and would prompt the user when information was missing, and also when you were allowed to move to the next step on the form.
Other than Caucasian, Latinos were the second largest ethnic group making up what I would estimate as fourty percent of the eighty or so applicants. There were six African American students, and two Native American students in the group. Of the Caucasians, five required a great deal of assistance in working through the forms, and about one third of the Latino students did also. Both Native American students progressed through quickly requiring little assistance. I feel that the individual’s level of previous experience with computers was the determining factor as to whether they would require assistance in navigating the application forms, and I seemed to be able to tell quickly which students, had used computers more frequently than others.
While I was working with the students, I kept in mind the information from the class assignments about access to technology that we studied in the first two modules and can clearly see how having regular access to a computer might yield an advantage compared to households where computer use is limited. The UTI open house was an all day event but the admissions department had wrapped up the application process in six hours, and everyone considered this event a success. Prospective students apply continually throughout the year, but events like this are beneficial because they reach a large number of students quickly. Personally, filling out an online form or application seems secondhand, but by working with the students, I now see that for some it is not that easy, and my participation in this event was a great way to add reallife experience to what we learned in the first two modules of class.