This week during my shadowing with senior consultants we went over a mock scheduling practice. I think that as a senior consultant, and especially site managers, it’s important to know how to schedule consultants during the temp, perm and final weeks. Even before becoming an intern, I knew that scheduling would be a difficult but good learning experience. I remember that when I was sending in my hours during the first semester, things would get a bit hectic with the live sign ups and remote sites. Sharon and Hilton showed me the final excel sheet that goes with scheduling consultants in remote SINC sites. Essentially all site managers are shared the spread sheet and whoever puts down a consultants’s name first, gets that person in their site. Sharon and Hilton both showed me how they processed the email requests that they get from consultants and decide who gets what hours. I was told that for senior consultants, each one has their own method of scheduling and that their is no one set method. I think the easiest way to do scheduling is to create an excel or Google doc sheet and place all the hours for the SINC site as well as listed available hours sent in by consultants. Afterwards, schedule as per your own discretion.  Block hours are pre-determined but can be changed if needed by the site manager. During one of my shadow hours, Sharon provided me with the requests she got for the Physics site so I could do a mock schedule.

During my shadowing hours with help desk consultants, we went over what is expected at boot-camp at the beginning of the fall semester. Senior consultants are expected to come in earlier than new/returning consultants for their own “senior consultant boot-camp” scheduled for Monday and Tuesday of the week before school starts. At boot camp, senior consultants are in charge of groups of new/returning consultant that are assigned to different workshops and activities over two day period. Consultants are given a checklist that senior consultants must check off through out boot-camp. I think that boot-camp for the fall semester will be an exciting experience to meet future consultants that we will be working with! Besides talking about boot-camp, we also had a phone call from Chemistry where a professor informed us that there was no paper in the printer. I told the professor to ask for the consultant posted in the SINC site and quickly resolved the issue.

Today’s  internship class didn’t take place in the usual Main Library classroom but instead took place in Frey Hall where we were introduced to some pretty neat stuff. Diana Voss and a faculty member at AV services showed us around the different rooms at Frey hall. The first stop was at a brand new testing computer site with 64 desktops for students to take tests. The room was a state of the art room with cameras, tinted glass, fingerprint scanners, adjustable tables and much more. In the back of the room there are even separate rooms for disabled or special needs kids. The computer site has yet been tested, but Diana informed us that the first class that would be testing it would be a MAT class. I think that at first the site will see intimidating but over time students will eventually get use to it. The only thing I would recommend is putting some graphical images in to cover up the white walls. The next stop in our tour was the public group centers located on the 2nd and 3rd floor where students can work together on projects and connect their devices to a display screen. After touring the 2nd and 3rd floor, we were brought to a room (forgot the room #) where they had speakers and videos setup for distant learning, allowing us to connect to similar designed room at other SUNY schools. I think this a very cool feature that our school offers and to be honest I didn’t even know our school had such a room until today. Our tour finally ended in the Frey 119 aka. (active learning center) where we learned how classes use the classroom and technology such as projectors, microphones, speakers, and cameras to teach new material.