Greetings, refilling paper,  delegating tasks… it was all just a blur. I can’t believe this is the end already. The semester rushed by way too quickly. It feels like just yesterday when I walked into the classroom and was nervous about everything. It felt like just yesterday that the job just started. With everything that I have learned from this internship, I feel like I am ready to take on the pressures of becoming a Senior Consultant. I feel like I am ready to become a leader, a mentor, and a friend to many new consultants. All of the “Next year.. when you become a senior consultant, you will…” will become true.
This week was another week of rushing to meet deadlines, final touches, and catching up. During the shadowing hours, Victoria discussed final procedures, and briefly went over what we learned over the semester. She gave me advice on how to become a better leader and to challenge myself. She taught me things that I would need to know when I become a senior consultant. She looked over my ePortfolio and told me about things that needed to be fixed. She taught me how to move my modules around and what would look better if it was placed in a different area. In the end, I feel very accomplished and I can’t wait to become a friendly face for many new consultants!

As one of the most hectic weekends ever lived, I would like to thank the existence of Google Calendars. This week alone, I had so many projects and presentations to do, and I couldn’t have done it without Google Calendars. It kept me on track and notified me every so often of what I had to do next. I felt so overwhelmed by all the work that just started accumulating just within this week alone. I generally do everything on time with the use of my planner and I always have a general idea of what to expect, but for a majority of my classes, my professors assigned presentations and group projects as a way to end the school year and in place of finals. Although this cleared me up for a good majority of finals week, it made this week so much more hectic. I wrote everything in Google Calendars and created my own checklist in my planner, so I would have an electronic copy and a paper copy. I learned that it is so important to have good time management skills, something a site manager must have. You have to make sure that you meet and create deadlines (such as for sign up). With the finals week schedule coming up, site managers receive schedules of their sites from Rose and then they have to assign consultants to work those shifts. They have to maintain an unbiased attitude while assigning these shifts and that they shouldn’t just give the shifts to friends or people they like. I learned about how Site Managers scheduled consultants for shifts, and that as a way to maintain fairness would be to set up deadlines and “rules” as to how you could obtain those shifts. I thought this was a great way to see if the consultants read each email and if they followed directions properly. Following directions is so crucial, and I could see why Site Managers would want people who follow directions to work in their sites.

 

While shadowing Victoria, I learned about how evaluations as a Senior Consultant are usually done. She taught me that the Senior Consultants evaluate consultants that they work with and the ones that work in their SINC Sites. Even though Glen is a great consultant and would also become a great Senior Consultant, she asked me to practice evaluating, by evaluating Glen. I asked him questions about procedures when working Main Library SINC Site, such as opening and closing procedures and how to make announcements. He did great on the evaluation (of course). I realized that sometimes, even if you know the consultant ver well, and how their work ethics are like, it is still important to do evaluations so you get a better sense of who they really are, instead of how you perceive them. I think that by evaluating and communicating with the consultants are a huge part of this job. By giving and receiving constructive criticism, it helps the individuals grow and learn as a person both professionally and personally. Seeing Victoria do her evaluations made me feel like if I were in her position, I would like to give and receive constructive criticism. I believe that nobody is perfect and that the only way to get closer to perfection, is through improving ourselves. But how are we supposed to improve ourselves if we don’t know what to improve on?

Not only did we cover evaluations this week, I also learned about the importance of delegating tasks and about leadership. I learned that even though we have mentors to shadow and that we should follow in their footsteps, we should maintain our own sense of originality. I learned a lot about how I am as a leader and what type of leader I want to be. I want to be a friendly face that other consultants or users can come to for advice. This week, I became comfortable with taking charge at Main Library SINC Site. My mentors allowed me to take charge and become “Site Manager of the Hour.” I practiced delegating tasks and learned how to be affirmative yet gentle when in an authoritative stance. I practiced how to be kind when trying to delegate tasks. I learned that consultants will respect you if you just ask kindly. When I was “Site Manager of the Hour,” I learned that knowing alternatives to problems just helps to make the run of things so much smoother. By knowing where things are on campus helps makes you a great senior consultant. When others ask where a certain item is or where to get a specific service, by knowing these alternatives, I feel great about myself when I know I can help others. Sometimes it is really frustrating when you need a specific service, but every time you ask someone, they redirect you to another place that isn’t exactly what you wanted. By being available and knowing alternatives, I can be that person to provide information to others.

I usually shadow in the beginning few days of the week (Monday afternoons and Tuesday mornings). My mentors taught me about the art of scheduling and what it means to be a good mentor. For scheduling, they showed me how to be as fair as possible when giving out shifts and how to organize consultant requests with an excel chart. In terms of being a good mentor, there are a few qualities that one should have before becoming someone’s mentor. They have to be approachable and must be able to be willing to share their skills and knowledge. Having a positive attitude and interest only benefits the mentor-mentee relationship. I felt empowered to be just like my mentors, who were both kind-hearted yet stern when dealing with consultants.

On Friday, we toured the ECC building. I learned a lot about the way our campus works. Previously, Jasmine had told me a little about this tour and how it was her favorite tour. She gave me a few details but it was because I wanted the tour to be more of an awe and jaw-dropping experience. We saw the many precautions that they took in there. You had to beep your card at the entrance for access, the doors had fire-proof precautions in the event that a fire started, it wouldn’t spread to other areas, and tons of security cameras. Everything on that tour was completely fascinating. Behzad showed us all the wires that each one connected to and their importance. He showed us that just by simply tearing a few wires, it would take a lot of teamwork to re piece those wires back together (although he could do it in 20 minutes if he tried). He showed us many different rooms, each time explaining the precautions that came with the room as well as functions of them. Towards the end of the tour, he let us walk into his office, and he showed us a very fascinating yet creepy system. It allowed him to track where a person who logged into WolfieNet-Secure had connected to all day. It showed the path the person took because the device pinged for connection each time. Although very useful if the information is used to find a lost phone or something, albeit I thought it to be a little too creepy.

This week, our class met up at Frey Hall for a tour of the building. We walked through a new computer testing room and a couple of the different learning areas of Frey Hall. The tour was like a roller coaster of emotions. When I first entered the new computer testing room, I felt overwhelmed and kind of taken aback by all the equipment. There was a fingerprint scanner, all sorts of cameras everywhere, above you, in front of you, behind you, and it felt like you were completely surrounded by all white walls. Although these were all precautions to prevent cheating, I felt intimidated by everything. A lot of the interns voiced our concerns during the tour, but it just felt very surreal. Things started kicking up when we went to the CoLA’s on the second floor. A lot of people didn’t even know the areas they had designated to be CoLA’s were even CoLA’s to begin with! I had a class in Frey Hall last semester and that professor made us use those CoLA’s after class time to practice our presentations, so I knew about it ahead of time. However, I did see why people would be confused as to whether it was  public space or whether the space required reservations. The area itself seemed very closed off and oftentimes, just passing by, it seemed as if it the seats were already reserved for others. It just didn’t have that “welcoming” vibe that other CoLA’s such as the one in North Reading Room had. Although it did feel a lot better to be in the Frey CoLA than the computing testing room.

Next, we walked to one of the conference rooms in Frey Hall. There, we saw two huge dual screen monitors with cameras. That room was one of the few conference rooms we have on campus. It is used for different classes that are considered “distant learning” classes. These classes have professors where they are teaching at a different location from the class. The screens show live feedback from both the students and the professors so it is almost as if they were in the same room. This room was completely fascinating. I really liked that idea of distant learning because it makes it easier for students and professors that teach extremely large classes. Instead of having so many different lectures for the same class, having this conference room would be a lot easier so the professor wouldn’t have to repeat the same lecture over many times. Although I know that a lot of people still prefer the old style of learning, I feel like this “distant learning” could be more beneficial than the old ways.  Some of the interns bought up how this conference room would be really useful for Bootcamp! I thought this was a really great idea because the professor can show their screen to the class. The only difficult part would be providing computers for every consultant who attends boot camp because the classroom itself doesn’t provide it for you. It was a really great idea, but it lacked feasible points.

This week, we learned how to use HTML and how to create a web page. I never used HTML or coded anything before so when Victoria, Celia, and Steven started the workshop on Sparky and Unix, I was head over heels with information and I couldn’t wrap my head around “tags.” Victoria was nice enough to slowly explain everything to me as Celia was leading the class on how to create tags and how to save things onto a folder.

Today was another day where Friday classes were cancelled due to the Correction Days that Stony Brook decided to instill. We still had to do our mandatory 4 hours of shadowing though. Jim and Victoria went over Footprints, and how to my foot prints page is different from theirs. They have a lot more options than I do, and can view other people’s foot prints. As for mine, I can only view the ones I have submitted and I don’t have much editing options. When making foot prints, I have to make sure I have their NetID’s and to make sure the foot print is assigned to someone. We also went over Pharos and the two card readers located in Main Library. Jim showed me how to tell if someone’s card is stolen or lost using the card readers. If the two card numbers didn’t match, then that means someone must have changed or updated ID cards and the system hasn’t updated it with the new information yet. Jasmine also went over VSS in a little more details and said that we don’t need to be connected to the Stony Brook Internet to use it anymore. We used to have to install a VPN to use it, but now it’s not necessary to. Jim recommended that I should take his VSS workshop!

Even though I didn’t go very far for my Spring Break, I thought I had a wonderful Spring Break. I spent a lot of time with my parents and learned a lot from them. A lot of my peers always say they don’t spend enough time with their parents, but if you really want something, you would make time for it. Although my parents don’t live very far from Stony Brook, it’s too much of an unproductive weekend if I were to go home every day or every weekend to visit them. We went to Boston to visit a few family members for the first few days, and did some exploring and shopping. It was really nice to finally catch up with my parents about what I’ve been up to at school.

Spring Break is coming up soon! I can’t wait to be home with my family. A lot of people are going with Florida either through ASBO or traveling alone. I wanted to go along with them, but I didn’t want to miss my opportunities to spend time with my family, so I decided not to go with them.

This week in class, we had a Library workshop. A librarian came to our classroom and taught us how to utilize the many databases that Stony Brook has to offer. He taught us how to narrow searches so we could find what we really need. Some of the options were “Full Text” and “Peer Reviewed.” This makes doing research a lot easier, since the database search engine narrows everything down for us. The librarian recommended EBSCOhost as a database for most searches. I used this website before in my WRT 102 class and I thought it was very useful when I was writing my research argument paper.

Even though Friday classes were cancelled due to the Correction Days that Stony Brook instilled, we still had to do our mandatory 4 shadowing hours. We went over Res-Net, and the many options students had on campus to connect to the Internet. Jim went over the opening and closing procedures of Main Library, and what to do in case of emergencies or in the event that you accidentally disarm the alarms. He also gave me a tour of the Main Library, and showed me what the OPSCAN office was for, and to be careful when dealing with scantrons. We, as Senior Consultants, should never touch the scan trons, and that we should only give envelopes to professors who ask and they should deliver it themselves to the OPSCAN office.

 

We also went over the differences between Macs and PCs. THere wasn’t much of a difference between the two, since many of the functions are similar, such as the Command on the Mac, is directly equal to the “Ctrl” button on PCs. I also learned that some programs aren’t compatible with MACs, so we have to open VSS in order to use them.