>> I love the fact that you help people.
I mean people come to you and they need help and you can actually give it to them
and it's really nice that when the students come in they've got this research need
and they're a little apprehensive if they're going to find it or not.
And not only do you help them find it but then you help them figure
out where they can go further which is a really cool thing to like see that done on their face
that not only did they get what they wanted but they can actually go further
than they'd originally thought which is always nice.
But I like the fact that you get to do stuff.
You get to order books.
You get to work with a faculty member on their personal research project.
You get to work with an entire department as their planning out like new courses,
so you get to touch the entire university in little bits in every single way like every day
and it's really neat because you really get like the big picture feel for the school all the time
which is such a great thing because it's so easy to get bogged down in
like the little minutia stuff and when you like work with the departments
like we do you really get to see like the bigger picture which is always fun.
The challenges are balancing and juggling all of that.
I mean I personally am liaison to seven or eight different departments
and so when the semester kicks in or right before mid-terms when faculty need me
to provide instruction to their students it can be really hard because I'll teach three
or four classes in one day or sometimes you get multiple people asking you
if you can teach Thursday at 2 o'clock and so you've got to juggle that plus stay on top
of ordering the books, pulling out the books that are old and outdated, creating websites,
keeping the websites updated for the faculty members and for the students
and staying on top of the technology.
We'll spend a year creating tutorials for how to use something and then our website changes
or the underlying technology changes and so we have to completely redo the tutorials
or the tutorial software itself becomes outdated or everything goes mobile like it is now
and the old software doesn't play well with iPhones or tablets so we need
to completely redo it in a completely different environment so we're constantly having
so stay up-to-date with things like that
and that can be really tricky to do because it's not our area.
We're generalists as well as subject specialists.
We're not technology people so it can be tricky to try and the do that.