IT Consulting

I realized that even though I have been blogging for around a year, I never really explain what goes into my job at the IT Help Desk. Well, I think I'm going to remedy that here and now.

First and foremost, my job is to help students and faculty with their computer issues, no matter what it may be. Sometimes my job stops after this step, because we don't support certain issues. Like, if your a student and your laptop breaks, and the screen doesn't work, we can't fix that. We don't deal with hardware issues for students. However, we will refer you to Best Buy or some other place that can do something about it.

For students, we really deal with software issues, whatever they maybe. If you can't figure out how to insert a header into a document on Microsoft Word, we can teach you. If you need help with iMovie or Photoshop, we're trained to help that as well. As well as many other things. One of the most important things we do is if you ever get locked out of anything (email, ANGEL, a school computer, etc.) we can unlock you remotely from our computer at the help desk. Pretty cool right?

It's pretty cool to help people like this. And I do believe that it is one of the hardest jobs on campus to have. I think you need a 3.5 GPA to be even considered for a consultant position, and you're not allowed to do homework on the job (this really stinks around finals time, but Kim and Patrick are usually good about letting you study for a bit). And even though you're on a computer, you're not allowed on social networking sites at all. So that's a hard addiction to break. At work, instead of being on those sites, you're expected to do tutorials which teach you the obvious and not so obvious stuff about common programs that people have problems with. Like inserting a section break so the numbering will be the way it needs to be on your 20 page paper (which I don't need to worry about this year-- thank heaven).

I mentioned Kim and Patrick. Patrick is a GA so he is like a supervisor I guess (I say this because he 'fires' me all the time and nothing happens). Kim is my boss I like to think. She's pretty cool, but when she says that she has a project for you, you'd better run the other direction.

Then there are the guys out in the back-- JC (which gets confusing because my friend JC [who is a girl] works as a consultant with me), Nick, Neil, and Charles-- they fix networking issues, ANGEL problems, and anything else that we can't handle almost immediately up at the desk. Dave and Scott work on the multimedia issues (like if you need a projector or something for an event, they will try to make sure that you get it). Scott and Charles also double to work on student's computers too. Sometimes there's a virus on a computer that is too tricky for a consultant to remove (for me, that's all the time). They know what their doing and can make sure that your computer is back in great shape. I know. Because Charles has done this for me once before and it made my day

I guess this is IT in a nutshell. If you need to know more about it, you can feel free to contact me, or even call the help desk at extension 1915.