2/17/15
This week’s internship class featured a presentation by Christopher Cheung about ways to properly make a presentation. As interns, we will be using Google Sites to create our final projects, then present them to members of the TLT department. But more importantly, Christopher’s tips will continue to be some of the more essential principles to remember when we become full-blown Sr. Consultants. This is because we will be expected to give professional presentations when hosting both Consultant-only or public workshops to the general Stony Brook community. Christopher also opened our eyes to the importance of professional formatting in documents. Whether creating a resume or workshop help sheet, proper layout and font choice choice have a great effect on the creator’s credibility in addition to simply allowing the document to be more easily read. I predict that mastering both of these skills will help me in becoming a more helpful consultant as well as in securing a respectable job in my professional career.
In other news, mentor shadowing has finally begun! I was fortunate enough to choose shifts with four unique Sr. Consultants so I can compare their different styles of work. I had only expected my shadowing to be mostly observing the Sr. Consultants as they handled customers or help desk calls during their respective shifts, so I was pleased that all of my mentors, Jasmine, Jenney, Charles, and Ming, were able to give me their full attention and effectively use every minute to share their knowledge with me. It seems that I made a good choice in picking hours later in the evening when the SINC sites are less busy!
I was impressed that we were able to cover so much information in the two hours each for help desk and site manager shadowing. Before this internship, I only had a rough idea of what help desk actually did (i.e. serving as an easy-to-contact source of support for university students and faculty), which actually seems to be accurate. However, Jasmine and Jenney began to show me more of the specifics behind their job. During the night shifts at NRR2, online requests for help, via email or the Velaro chat system, appear to be more prevalent than phone calls. A Help Desk consultant also records all activity through footprint tickets, so that other TLT members can work to resolve problems even after the consultant who discovered the issue finishes their shift. I thoroughly reviewed the list of Help Desk staff members to get a good idea of who to direct questions at depending on the problem type.
As for the Site Manager side of mentoring, Charles and Ming understood that I was very familiar with regular consultant and even some site manager responsibilities after working 8 hours of shifts in Main library during last semester’s perm schedule. Consequently, they were able to test me on things like opening and closing procedures for various SINC sites, no show procedures, and how to handle the SINC site phone if it rings. Afterward, they explained the less obvious, yet equally important roles of a site manager, including maintaining supplies for your site, monitoring cleaning and supply blogs, scheduling, and taking attendance.
Though I’m sure that I’ll have the chance to better compare these two positions later as the semester progresses, I would currently say that the Help Desk is more focused on the customer service side of TLT while Site Managers interact more in the consultant team setting.