'Excuse me, are you the CA?'

By Ayon Nandi

The rankings are out. Only this time, they're not from US News and World Report, and they're not on academics. The May 1998 issue of Yahoo Internet Life, a magazine spawned from the popular web search engine, Yahoo!, included a ranking of "America's 100 Most Wired Colleges." Yale placed a respectable 30th (better than Harvard and Princeton). The ranking weighed factors including the percentage of students who own computers, the presence of a campus network, the percentage of classes with online work or materials, the number of student home pages, and even whether there is a student newspaper online.

However, there was one aspect that the rankings left out: computing support. Most colleges have some sort of technical support, which may consist of a help desk where students can drop off their broken computers for repair, or of students that are hired as computing helpers. But the quality of computing support varies from school to school.

Computing support provided by students

LIZ OLINER/YH CA Ben Monreal, TD '99, working on a cluster computer

Yale's computing facilities are supported by a network of Computing Assistants, with 4 CAs per college and one CA per graduate residence. Unlike schools which hire professionals to man help desks, such as Dartmouth, Yale computing support is basically provided by students who are under similar academic and social constraints as their "clients." On average, from mid-October on, the typical CA works one four-or-five-hour shift per week in one of the clusters on campus, and an additional eight to ten hours weekly helping individual students with problems. However, in September the workload is much greater. CA Laura Moranchek, PC '98, said she works two to three times more in the beginning of the year than during the rest of the year. "I usually work eight to ten hours per week during the year...and 20 hours or more per week at the beginning of the year," she said. "More and more people want to get networked. It's the first thing people want to do when they get here."

In addition to the burden of a large number of confused Yalies fiddling with their ethernet cards, the beginning of the year also involves "ironing out bugs in the system," according to Moranchek. There are also new CAs to train, as well as nailing down unexpected problems.

The time pressures in September seem to have hampered some CAs' effectiveness. Jay Augsbuger SY '01 had problems with the Saybrook CAs at the beginning of the semester. "Saybrook has the crappiest CAs of all time. The CAs never even got around to answering my question and my computer broke down. I wasted my time fixing it myself. So I think 'deadbeat CAs' sums it up pretty well for Saybrook," he said. However, some students are satisfied with the CAs' performance. Navin Manglani, PC '01, praised his CAs as "helpful and really cool."

Sometimes CAs, especially seniors, feel the pressure of the extra time demand and leave the CA position, according to Edward Kairiss, the Acting Director of Instructional Computing.

The time-commitment problem will likely be exacerbated in the next few years, because the number of incoming students with new computers who want to be connected to the campus network will probably increase. In previous years, many--approximately half, according to CA Greg Hintz, DC '00--of students with computers decided against getting room connections because of the charges for network access. However, next year, the network charges will be bundled into a $200 increase in tuition. Some CAs anticipate that this will cause more students to ask for CA help in connecting their computers. CA Steve Miller, BK '99, said, "If more people feel that they have already paid for the [network] access...a lot more people may want room connections next year," he said. However, Hintz said that he thinks the number of requested room connections "will rise, but not by overwhelming numbers.... [It's] nothing we can't handle."

The problem of more room connections, however, is mainly an issue only in the beginning of the year, when freshmen enter Yale and almost immediately want to have their computers networked. After that, according to CA Hank Tu, BK '99. the pace of a CA's life slows down considerably. "In the beginning of the year, things can get pretty nasty.... Right now, I rarely get housecalls," he said.

Because the burden on CAs varies widely throughout the year, opinion is divided on the issue of hiring more CAs. While Tu feels that "more CAs won't really help," Miller suggested that a few more CAs could be helpful in the beginning of the year. There are no current plans to raise the number of CAs from four per residential college. Kairiss, however, has been meeting with the CAs "extensively," according to Moranchek. Miller, Hintz, and other CAs have also had talks with Kairiss on numerous occasions. "We've chatted about the future of things [with Kairiss] and how we can provide better support," said Moranchek. Kairiss stressed that he would not make any major changes without talking to the CAs first. "We [Academic Computing Services] really have to listen to the CAs.... If they tell us that they are overworked...we will certainly make some changes."

Changing the CA system

Many CAs are contemplating more profound changes in the computing assistance system than merely hiring more CAs. Morancheck forsees the need "for a major restructuring" somewhere down the line. Ideas that have been put forth have included splitting CAs into a group of "cluster" CAs, whose sole duty would be to man the computing labs, and residential college CAs, who would be solely responsible for housecalls in their college. Also, Moranchek and the Berkeley CAs have been considering re-emphasizing the role of the CA as an educator. Moranchek said, "The CAs were originally educators...about computing." The Berkeley CAs have considered beginning workshops on computer skills such as HTML and spreadsheets. "If we have decent hardware in the swing space next year, we are thinking of running some workshops," Tu said.

Yale is not alone in its struggle to find the ideal computing assistance program. According to Amy Phillips, the Associate Director of residential computing support at Pennsylvania, the '98-'99 school year marks the first year Pennsylvania is putting one Information Technology Assistant (ITA) in each dorm. Already, most dorms have an ITA, and for students like Robin Rolewicz, a freshman at Pennsylvania, computing help is literally across the hall. "I had two [ITAs] living in my hall--they're pretty cool. I used their help mostly at the beginning of the year.... My [ITA] set up my email for me," she said.

Other colleges have only a help desk, instead of CAs on call. Brown has a help phone line that is staffed seven days a week, but has no consultants on-call. Similarly, Dartmouth has a help desk manned by students, with two professional consultants helping the student consultants with more advanced problems.

Yale has a unique system of computing support; the residential-college CA system falls somewhere between Pennsylvania's next-door ITA system and Dartmouth's walk-in help desk. However, as the number of networked computers on campus has increased rapidly in recent years, the number of CAs has not increased commensurately, and many students have found themselves turning for help not to CAs but to other students. Some, like David Buchwald, TD '00, feels the need for more CAs. "There should be more [CAs]. There have been many times when people have asked me to fix their computers because the CAs would have been too slow in helping them," he said. Jared Kaye, MC '01, said that four CAs are enough since "most people turn to friends who know a lot about computers before turning to CAs."

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