Student Staff - n. an energetic, brilliant, creative, talented potential rolled into a food-driven, sleep-deprived, unmotivated creature who wears dirty clothes
McRitchie K.
2003
31st Annual ACM SIGUCCS Fall Conference (SIGUSS Conference Proceedings
0
Students are a wonderful resource for any department of a college or university, especially an ITS department. They are inexpensive and abundant. They want to work at strange times. What more could you ask for? The problem is that it is important to dig out the good ones from the population. Finding the right student staff is just as important as finding the right full time staff. Even though you may only employ them for three or four years, it is still important that they are good employees and many departments let things slide because "they are just students and they'll be gone." Conventional methods of hiring and training in a corporate situation are not what will work in this strange academic environment. At Grinnell College, a small liberal arts college in the Midwest, the student hiring and training process was modified and developed into an extremely successful model. The ITS department employs approximately 60 students, 25% of them are hired each year. There has only been one student fired in the past five years and only a handful of disciplinary problems. If a good process is in place for hiring and training students, the end result is a good student employee and a good return on the department's investment. The Grinnell process development involved student staff, ITS staff and the college's Career Development Director. The process was modified due to a claim of cultural discrimination by a student that was not hired as an employee. After the old process was examined, changes were made and the students that are hired may still be those dirty clothes wearing creatures, but they are excellent employees.
Hiring; Interview; Management; Student staff; Training
Conference paper
Scopus