In his latest video, Boise State CIO and Associate Vice President Max Davis-Johnson talks about how the Office of Information Technology relies on several dozen student employees to provide customer service, business intelligence, development services and more to our University community.
Students are core to our mission in OIT.
Video Transcript
Hi! This is Max Davis-Johnson, Boise State University, Office of Information Technology.
Today I’m going to talk about students, and obviously students are why we’re here at Boise State. If students weren’t here I wouldn’t be here, you wouldn’t be here, these buildings wouldn’t be here.
Students are how we support students at Boise State. The students are a big part of our organization. Over a course of a semester we have 75 to 80 students working in OIT. They do a variety of different things for us. They work here helping support us in the Zone, where students can walk in and get support.
If you call the Help Desk odds are pretty strong that you’re going to get a student agent that’s going to answer your call, and they’ll do it very well. If you’re in classroom and there’s a technical issue we’ll dispatch a classroom support [specialist] within five minutes, and it’s typically a student that’s going to come and show and fix your problem.
We use students in other areas in the organization too. They are a big part of the web development team that do our web and mobile app development here at Boise State. They’re part of our Business Intelligence team.
Students are core to what we try to do here at Boise State.  They’re core in the fact that that’s who we support, and they’re core to how we support students. And faculty and staff!
Let’s go talk to some of our student developers here at Boise State.
So, one of the neat things about having students working in OIT is that when they graduate we’ve had an opportunity to hire a large number of them as full-time Boise State employees. We have developers that have become full-time Boise State employees, we have network engineers, we have system engineers. Our Deputy CIO was a student employee here at one time.
It’s really good. It’s good for the students, it’s good for us to be able when they graduate to hire them.
And so, I think what’s really neat too are some of the projects that our development team works on. Most of our web products or web apps have a student development component to them. One of the main things that this student team developed (and basically is all student developers) is that they wrote the interface between Blackboard grades and PeopleSoft grades,  and that’s something that faculty are using more and more. But essentially it’s “students schooling faculty,” and it’s one of our most highly used apps, especially during the grading period (which is basically coming up here).
So we’re really excited about the students, the work they do for us. We’re really excited that we can teach them skills, and even if you work in OIT and you don’t go on to a career in technology, most of our students have a basic understanding how to configure machines, how to load software, how to understand, you know, concepts from a technology standard. So it certainly helps them in their future careers whether they’re in technology or not.
Again, students are core to our mission here at Boise State. They’re core to why we’re here. At the same time, they’re core to how we support students, faculty, and staff.
Thank you.
Questions or Comments?
Max would love to hear from you at max@boisestate.edu.