Jo Hamburge '97, right, talks with Marcy Decker in the Registrar's Office in Day Hall last week. Frank DiMeo/University Photography
More than three years later, it's hard for Jo Hamburge to pass Barton or Balch or Goldwin Smith halls without conjuring thoughts of her first week at Cornell.
"I have a vivid memory of sitting on the top bunk of my room in Balch with all those forms," she said. "The adviser's form was in triplicate and kind of confusing. And course exchange as a freshman? It was overwhelming. I would characterize it as something less than a nightmare, but not much."
Those are only memories for Hamburge, an English major and Cornell Tradition fellow who returned last week to begin her final semester with little trepidation about dealing with such details as her course schedule, tuition bill, credits toward graduation, campus job prospects or career options. She had seen to them all months ago from a computer in her off-campus apartment and could even double-check from a terminal when she was home in Minnesota during the break.
"Everything's online now," she said. "I made up my entire schedule in October. You just log on and you find out what courses are available and whether you're in."
That technology has transformed the start of a semester -- a once-frustrating period of long waits and confusing information that provoked extreme anxiety before, during and after registration -- into a piece of cake for most Cornell undergrads. And according to David S. Yeh, assistant vice president for student and academic services, it is only the start of the transformation.
"With all the streamlined processes we have across campus now -- classroom scheduling, CoursEnroll, faculty advisory access to student data, SCAMP, student employment -- it is hard to realize that only a few years ago we were still doing all this by hand," Yeh said. "Registration used to be a three-day ordeal, and it is now a four-hour process. Eventually it should take as little as 20 minutes."
The collaboration of central and college-based student services offices that produced these efficiencies will be important with the advent of Project 2000, the universitywide approach to improving administrative efficiency and coordination. Of course these efforts have never been a small or easy task.
Yeh cites a framework developed in the 1980s when offices most responsible for student and academic services were restructured to improve delivery of such services. Students, faculty members and administrators began reaping the benefits in 1991 with the advent of "Mandarin Tools," which allowed easy access to a number of computer applications then available.
A series of further improvements has followed, including "Just the Facts" (1992-93), which gave students online access to their own data; "Faculty Advisor," making it easy for faculty members to track the progress of advisees (1993-94); "CoursEnroll", the online student registration system (1993-94); "Resumix" and "Job-Trak," databases for Career Services that create access to job and internship opportunities (1994-95); and the distribution of online student appointments through Bear Access (1994-95).
The key for Yeh is not to eliminate the human element from the process but to make it function even better. He says he remembers when it took weeks to puzzle out the complexities of matching courses with classrooms before the start of a semester, a process now streamlined by a program called "Schedule25."
"You want to spend your time dealing with real problems," Yeh says, "not routine, repetitive questions."
Advances such as those made in Student Employment Services have been beneficial not only to students but to staff as well. Dennis Chavez, director of the office, reports that his office used to process 17,000 appointment forms. Now, with this material distributed online through CHRISP (Cornell Human Resources Information System Project), departments can determine immediately whether a potential student employee is eligible for work study and complete the student appointment in a minute or less.
Departments and programs also use the Web to collaborate across organizational boundaries, providing students information from a different perspective. For example, Chavez says, Civitas, Career Services, the Theory Center and his office all provide information about experiential opportunities. "Students now connect current job employment to career development," he noted. "They relate to how skill development today can help them tomorrow."
Hamburge, who now works in the Student and Academic Services office and is looking forward to a computer science course she starts this week called "Creating Web Documents," can identify. But the senior, who hopes to go to law school, spotted her own campus job the old-fashioned way.
"I was standing around on the first floor of Day Hall and a friend of mine said, 'Hey there's a job upstairs you might be interested in.' So I guess no matter how much we computerize, it still pays to be in the right place at the right time."
In the few years it has taken Cornell to go from "in line" to "online," a remarkably high number of students and faculty have made the move. Consider these statistics from Student and Academic Information Services: