Twin Cities updates (September 2017)

Helping U: Students helping students navigate the U
One Stop Student Services and the Office for Student Affairs have partnered together to enhance the Helping U desk in Bruininks Hall.

At the Helping U desk, student-staff have been trained to connect fellow students to University-based resources such as academic support, career help, and health services. The desk is open M-F 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.

Find Twin Cities Campus Study Spaces
Study Space Finder is a new service for students that includes images, building features, and study locations on the Twin Cities campus. The project is a collaboration among the Office of Classroom Management, University Libraries, Student Unions, the Office of Information Technology, AHC Classroom Services, and University Services. Email studyspacefeedback@umn.edu with questions about the website.

One Stop Student Services and MyU Portal start-of-term statistics
This year proved to be just as busy as previous years in One Stop Student Services. For the two of the busiest weeks of the year (the week before classes and the first week of classes), the volumes of calls answered, emails sent, and in-person counseling contacts were similar to last year’s volumes. In total (phone, email, and in-person), One Stop staff handled approximately 8350 contacts during the 5-day week before classes, and about 8900 contacts during the 4 days of the first week of classes.

While there are always ups and downs with the wait times throughout any given day, the average wait times for our phone queues reflected significant decreases compared to last year. For the week before classes, the phone wait times averaged 2 minutes on Queue 1 (general questions answered by student employees) and averaged 4 minutes on Queue 2 (more complex questions answered by full-time staff). This is up to a 5 minute decrease in wait times compared to last year. However, walk-in counseling wait time averages increased somewhat this year. Start of the term system performance and availability issues impacted our volumes and wait times.

The MyU Portal had increases in the number of sessions, page views, and users for the first day of the fall semester compared to last year at this same time. On the first day of fall term, there were 110,764 unique users in MyU.

Staffing Updates

• OTR welcomed two new employees on September 11 
• Kate Hemmer is our new Assistant Registrar who joins us from Marquette University.
• Theresa Nelson joins as a Graduate Education Records Specialist from Student Counseling Services here at the U.
• ASR IT
• Nathan Carlson joined the Destiny One support team on September 18. He comes to us from Metro State.
• After 36 years of service to the University, Linda Miza retired on September 1. In her business analyst role Linda was a valuable member of the student records team, extremely knowledgeable, and always willing to assist others. We wish her well in her future endeavors.
• Sherief Elabbady from the Student Data and Analytics team left the University to take a role with Land O’Lakes. His last day was August 25.
• Debbie Gillespie from the Custom Solutions team left ASR to take a role with Particle. Her last day was September 20.