Divine Lunacy

The following is the result of a recent experience with The Department of Housing and Residential Life at the University of Rhode Island. Said experience left me angered, and disappointed. I guess I’m probably just sour and selfish, but when I get pissed enough, I write random essays.

Early in the spring semester, resident students are mailed instructions^[1] informing them of the process and deadlines for registering for housing in the following fall semester. This, however, is the last notice one is likely to receive from Housing and Residential life. After submitting housing applications in March, students are assigned random registration times.

When registration times are posted in April, students are expected to look up their registration times on the housing website and present themselves at the Roger Williams Building at the randomly assigned time. One might casually refer to registration times as appointments. In casual conversation, however, the word appointment is generally associated with mutual consent–a courtesy clearly lacking in this instance. It is unquestionable that this process is flawed and requires review. To my knowledge, no significant changes have been made to the student-facing part aspects in recent years. Even the simplest change, such as an email reminder, would have a tremendous impact.

In the process of randomly assigning registration times, it is possible and possibly highly probable for a randomly assigned registration time to conflict with the assignees schedule. Fortunately, Housing and Residential life provides provisions for this in their documentation: “Residents may also have a proxy register for them. The proxy must present their valid URI ID and the valid URI ID of the resident whom they are representing, at that resident’s assigned registration time.” Once again, this solution is far from optimal. Student ID cards, as per the provisions on the cards’ rear, “must be carried at all times on the campus.” Thus, one must be off-campus while registering by proxy. Albeit unlikely that students give heed to this warning, they should not be encouraged to give their ID cards to another person. Student ID numbers are used to control access to many resources, including grades (depending on the class), physical access to restricted areas, and housing registration times. Student ID cards should be treated like passwords; they should be kept secure, and not shared.

If perchance a student’s assigned registration time brings rise to a scheduling conflict, he must then question his values: is a VoIP phone and a savings of almost two thousand dollars^[2][3] more valuable than attending class? This question is posed to students by a department of the institution that should be encouraging their class attendance. The mission of Housing and Residential Life^[4] is simple: “to provide quality campus housing …, which supports the educational goals of the University…” They have been true to this goal. In and of itself, the housing is of a sufficiently high quality standard, and does support educational goals to a reasonable extent. Registering for the housing is apparently not intended to support educational goals.

It could be argued that my analysis of this process is excessively critical. Class registration appointments are also assigned without students’ input or consent. Students are expected to be responsible enough to know when their appointments are and to make provisions as necessary. Class registration is done online, and the times are made available well in advance. In contrast, housing registration times were released only 5 days prior to the first appointments, and require physical commitment.

While I am on the topic of Analysis… That is where I was during my registration time on April sixth at three fifteen PM, the second time slot on the first day. A time that early essentially would have afforded me free choice over my accommodations. Had I been aware that my appointment was during that class, I likely would have opted to register for housing instead of attending class, even though I had an exam the next time that class met.

Upon expressing moderate discontent over receiving inadequate notice regarding this appointment, I was given no direct response to this–only that I could register at three o’clock that afternoon. I am not the only irresponsible student on campus, rather this seems to be a bit of an epidemic. When at registration, students who had missed previous appointments were specifically called to the front of the line. There were approximiately ten such persons present. We were casually questioned about why we had missed our registrations. The response was unanimous: none of us had been aware that we were missing anything! And this was only one day; there were likely other people who missed their appointments, but attended registration on different days.

The response from the HRL staff seemed to be along the lines of confusion; confusion that so many people could have missed their registration times. Housing and Residential Life is a business: students pay them money in exchange for housing. Though the department does have a monopoly over on-campus housing, this should not affect the level of service provided. Students failing to show at their assigned times due to lack of awareness is a low level of service, and should alert the staff that that their modus operandi is not operating sufficiently well. A brief review could likely result in many improvements. In previous years, for example, I recall the registration times being posted in obvious locations around the residence halls’ entrances. This year, however, there was nothing [in Eddy]. (There was a reminder email sent prior to the housing application deadline. The bottom of this email included notice that registration times would be posted on April first. The email was well in advance of the first registration times. Furthermore, the existence of the email indicates that Housing and Residential Life posesses sufficient technlogy to send another reminder, after posting the registration times.)

Lack of good customer relations is far from being the only problem with this convoluted system. During a time when computers are being implemented to complete an increasing number of tasks efficiently, registering for housing remains a manual and inefficient process. This process is long, arcane, and seemingly tautological. I am led to wonder if a computer-based solution has even been considered. Housing and Residential Life’s website provides some insight^[5]: freshmen housing applicants are able to edit their previously submitted applications online through a commercial product called my housing. (Edit: summer housing applications also appear to be done through this application) The current implementation does not appear to utilize a large subset of the applications features, but this at least demonstrates that there has been some attempt to modernize and innovate.

I can only conjecture that failure to replace upperclassmen housing registration with an electronic process arises from lack of software or personnel. From my knowledge of the logic involved in registration, it seems that a custom application could be developed with relative ease, even by a novice programmer. Much of the required infrastructure is already in place, and student labor is generally cheap. An application developed in-house could easily handle the entire process, down to tracking payments (not necessarily accepting them).

My interactions with Housing and Residential Life are mostly limited to room registration, check-in, and checkout. Registration therefore accounts for roughly one third of the time I spend interacting with them. This one third of my experience has been far from pleasant. Following their mission statement, HRL lists “principles [that] should apply to every work situation, every day”. These principles, customer service, innovation, communication, are basic, yet precisely those which they have failed to deliver. Employing the same arcane process year after year is a failure to innovate; not effectively communicating registration times is failure to communicate. Some of the responsibility should still fall on the students, but are simple email reminders and posters unreasonable requests? Students are customers, and Housing and Residential Life should aim to make the housing registration process as painless as possible. They will probably say that I am just sour over missing my appointment. This is partially true, but In future years, I hope to see significant revisions to the housing registration process.

[1] http://housing.uri.edu/docs/NITT.pdf
[2] http://www.uri.edu/dining/faqs.htm#Northwoods
[3] http://www.uri.edu/dining/contract.htm
[4] https://ehousing.uri.edu/MyHousing/Login.cfm
[5] http://housing.uri.edu/hrl_vision.html

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 10th, 2009 at 1253:40 and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.