My transition from a non-student employee to a student worker

MAT SCOTT ‘19

News Editor

I wrote an article a couple of weeks ago about Denison’s administration of the work-study program, but that’s only the tip of the iceberg that is my displeasure when it comes to the way student employment is handled.

Like I said before, I work at the pool as a lifeguard, head lifeguard (basically the supervisor), swim instructor and lifeguard instructor. Since I only live about ten minutes away from campus, I also worked at the pool in high school as a casual employee.

Last summer, I was given another promotion to aquatic facility monitor. Unlike the promotion to head lifeguard, the AFM promotion also included a pay raise from $8.75 to $10 per hour. I worked at that pay rate all summer.

Lo an behold, however, I became and am now a student. That pay raise I got after working at the pool for two years and doing everything I could to advance? Gone. Thanks, Office of Student Employment, for docking my pay when I enroll to go to your school.

On top of that issue is the mess that is my account. Student accounts have an underscore in the username (e.g. scott_m1), whereas faculty/staff accounts don’t (e.g. scottmc). When I worked as a non-student employee, I had a staff account, but once I became a student nobody updated it.

Great, right? No email address change, no new usernames and passwords to remember, and everything just stays the same. But the problem with that is that staff accounts don’t get print budgets, meaning that everything I printed my first semester docked straight to my Denison Dollars.

When I went to get it fixed, I was sent by ITS to the Office of Student Accounts, who in turn told me I needed to talk to the Registrar’s Office, who sent me back to ITS.

I had to go through an entire account overhaul, switching my existing staff account to a student account, which resulted in some problems with my email and particularly Blackboard.

What gets me is that there isn’t a system in place for handling the staff-to-student transition. As a student, I shouldn’t have to go through three different offices to get something corrected that shouldn’t have been a problem in the first place. Someone knew that I was enrolled as a full-time, degree-seeking student, but it never got communicated to the other offices.Creating quite the mess for me.