UTI Phase Start March 12th, 2007
Event: UTI PHASE START
March 12th, 2007
For this activity I worked with the student services department for the start of classes on March 12th, 2007. At UTI, students attend classes in phases that run for three weeks, and attend class for six hours per day. During their education at UTI, students will successfully complete a total of twenty-eight phase courses to satisfy the requirements to graduate with an Associates Degree in Automotive Sciences. At the start of each phase, students often have issues to take care of such as account balances, text book purchases, class scheduling including changes and substitutions, tool purchases, and receipt and processing of financial assistance.
All of these functions have been set up for online access and students are required to make changes online in a manner very similar to the StudentLink utilized by U of A students. One the first day of the phase the student services department has ten computers set up for students to use for making changes to their account, and for this portion of my service learning project I assisted approximately forty students in this process.
When I started that day, I figured that the questions I would be helping students with would be relatively simple and would be contained within the process of our student services programs. But I found out quickly that it was not the case as some students needed to access their bank account statements, verify payment status, fill out missing financial aid applications, submit government assistance applications, in addition to making schedule changes and purchasing text books.
I would say that approximately eighty percent of the students were able to operate without much assistance but the remaining twenty percent required a fair amount of assistance. Many of those students did not seem comfortable navigating the software programs and some needed me to work them through, step-by-step. Things got really tricky with some documents that needed additional correspondence where information would need to be sent to a student, even though in some instances the student did not have an email address. In those instances, I helped the students open up a yahoo email account and by the end of the day had assisted twelve students with their first email address. Of the twelve students, four were Native American, seven were Latino, and one student was Caucasian but from rural Colorado. I would estimate all of them to have been recent high school graduates and would assume that their geographic areas of origins would be rural with limited access to technology.
In the six hours I spent working in the student services department I enjoyed working with the students to establish their email addresses the most. Once we had their accounts established I would have them send a sample email and receive one as well, and they really lit up once they realized they had set everything up correctly. I let them know where my office was incase they needed help in the future and I think that alone was worth my time in the department. In the automotive industry, technology continues to spread rapidly and a great deal of service related email and communication is transmitted through email, so this will be an import skill for these new students.