Campus is alive in ways that I am only seeing for the first time. Students are hustling to classes, I see events happening on the Quad, and there are conversations happening in every quiet corner as I move across campus. UChicago was an inspiring place when I first arrived when it was nearly empty, but now that I see it coming to life with the spirit of our faculty and students I can start to appreciate it in new ways.
Having the students back reminds me of how important it is that we recognize the need to always focus energy on delivering services that work to delight them as they do their work. Being a student is hard and I think being a student in today’s World is perhaps even more demanding then it was when I was in college. Students are juggling demands that rival the rigor of the most intense jobs and many are doing it with the added pressure of being away from home for the first time. I want to make sure that while we are focusing intensely on replacing many of our enterprise systems, managing high performance computing environments, creating interfaces to data that drive administrative work, and developing new ways to protect Institutional assets that we keep part of our attention on the students walking around our campus. They are what should make us smile on days when smiles are tough to come by. The students love being here and we need to continue to pour energy into making sure we make this the best experience that we can. For them … and for us.
I have always found that focusing my energy on creating a great environment for students can in fact make the campus a much better place. These students come with intense expectations. Expectations that are born out of living digital from the time they were very young. Many of them only know a world where online experiences look more like the effortless stream of a television and are not plagued with waiting for connections, plugging into a network, or, in some cases, logging into spaces via a browser. I want to make sure we are challenging ourselves to look at the work they need to do through their eyes. I want to work together to understand their needs and deliver experiences that live up to those expectations. Simply, I want to make sure we are doing what we can to make them smile.
As the dad of a high school senior, I can confidently say that today’s students just expect the IT infrastructure to work flawlessly all the time. And they’re unlikely to be understanding or forgiving if it doesn’t, so it’s up to us to give them at least the same level of service and ease of use they experience with their consumer applications and networks.
Agreed. And I’ll add that we have a lot to learn from our students in terms of how we can be prioritizing our work. We all know they want great wireless, but how do they feel about the physical spaces we manage for example? I love finding time to really understand what they are interested in … and the other thing I’ve found amazing is that they give really great answers if asked.