Does your computer ever bug out? Run slower than it really should? Mine does. As a student with only a small income, I took my computer to Information Technology Services— because it’s free.
That was about a month ago. I never heard from them, so I went in one day and they were, of course, very nice, but something struck me as odd: They had worked on my computer for a whopping 45 minutes in the month that it had been sitting there!
To say I am outraged is an understatement. Where is their service?
When questioned, ITS fell back to, “We have priorities; we do all the work on computers for the entire school.” I can certainly understand that, but why are students on the bottom of this priority list? Aren’t we the ones paying over $40,000 to go here? Shouldn’t we be ranked a little more toward the top?
There are so many organizational problems here. Why don’t they have a staff member dedicated to student computers and game systems? Why start a project, and then stop? Finish the job.
A student cannot go to a professor and blame their priority list for not getting a paper done, especially if they had a month to work on the paper. It comes with the job, whether as student, teacher, administrator or Information Technology Services. We all have priorities that help us get our jobs done in a timely matter, or at least I thought we did.
How can we be expected to learn and live if our computers sit for days, weeks and months, not being worked on? Sure, the library is open late, but it is not really an option if you don’t want to fall asleep in your 8:30 or 9 a.m. classes or if you’re like me and do some really great work at all hours of the night.
Having the ability to get out of bed, turn on your computer — if you ever even turn it off — and write for 15 minutes, then go back to bed, is all a part of the college experience.
Sorry, I don’t want to walk down stairs in a dorm, or over to a dorm for those of us who live in houses, at 3 a.m. during Winter Term, wait 15 minutes to log in, wait another 5 while it loads my settings and then write what I was going to write, log off and trudge back to bed. I thought that our lives were supposed to be enriched by ITS, not degraded.
Chris Schmidt ‘13