My Experience as a Charter Member of Research Rookies
I woke up to a call from my boss at NIU Career Services. With tightly closed eyes, I rolled over and answered the phone as cheerfully as I could for someone who is half asleep. “You are on the front page of the NIU website!!” I couldn’t imagine a better wake-up call.
There I stood, right in front of my research poster at the Undergraduate Research and Artistry Day on the front page of the NIU website. A large red ribbon spread across the shot with the words “Research Rookies; Expanding undergraduate research opportunities”. From now on, I would forever be known as a Research Rookie.
A year earlier, while anxiously scheduling my classes during my freshman orientation, I noticed a number of things about the scheduling system that I did not like. So I drew out a calendar on a piece of notebook paper and drew in some classes. I did this multiple times with different combinations of the classes. It took a frustratingly long time and two pencil erasers to find the combination of classes that I liked best. I finally settled on a schedule but for all I know, there could have been a better combination that I was not aware of.
The light bulb flickered on!
I wrote a program in Microsoft Excel that made it faster, better, and easier to schedule my classes. With helpful guidance from my mentor, Dr. Charles Downing of the Operations Management and Information Systems Department of the College of Business, I began to design a new program from the ground up. I learned the Visual Basic for Applications programming language to write the program and began to fashion together all of the missing elements and features I wanted in my ideal scheduling system. I named it “Schedule Me!”.
Schedule Me! filters through times and days of the week to reduce the number of class sections to choose from. Some classes had only about 10 sections, but others had more than 70. Filtering out those 8am classes and Friday classes made it easy for me to create my ideal schedule.
Many students volunteered to go through my program and complete a Before & After survey. The results were phenomenal. My program was a resounding success.
The only downfall was that it is incompatible with the university computer scheduling system and therefore no one else could use it in the way it was intended. It was still a great success and an incredible research experience, even though my project could not immediately help the students of NIU.
The Silver Lining…
Brian Brim, the Project Manager of the MyNIU Student Information System, asked me to help him gather data from students about the new beta version of MyNIU. My project this year will be to survey samples of the student body to gather information and feedback about the MyNIU program. I will be asking NIU students about the frequency, duration and expectations they have when they log in to MyNIU. By directly interviewing the end users, Brian Brim and the designers of MyNIU will be able to expertly modify and expand the features and benefits of the MyNIU experience to reflect the student’s needs and greatly enhance the effectiveness of the new beta version of the program.
I love my Huskie community and I am grateful for this opportunity to give back to it.
Now back to bed…
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