Student-Run IT System Just Makes Sense

dustpuppy writes: "This article talks about how volunteer students took over the administration and operation of the IT facilities at a University of Melbourne residential college. I thought the article worthwhile in that it should remind us that very few other industries have the opportunity where young people can step in and make a very real difference. We really are very lucky to live in the age that we do!" The article feels a little "gee-whiz!" and I hope student-run IT systems aren't are rare as this implies, but a positive case study is great to see. Seems like a lot of academic networks become embroiled in exercise-of-authority games instead of cooperation. Anyone with academic-net experiences, please speak up.

Comments

Stanford's web system....

[startled]

I was at Stanford when they decided to replace their old, ugly web page with a "bigger and better" one. $50,000 later, they had one of the ugliest web pages I'd ever seen. Ugly, no problem-- it was easy to navigate, right? Wrong. Everything useful was buried under 10 or so levels of seemingly irrelevant links.

The problem? The web page was made by "professionals" who had no idea what the students or faculty needed from their web page. It was a decent advertisement for the school (aside from being really ugly), but the removal of the old site meant students and staff were left stranded for quite some time.

The entire project was finished in several months-- about the time span of 1-2 quarters. Now imagine instead the learning experience that could have come from a course dedicated to creating the site. HCI would be taught for design; databases, algorithms etc. would be taught for all of the back end. It would have been a great learning experience for all involved, and the end result would have been a web site the students and faculty would have actually used.

Instead, what eventually happened is they spent more and more money to make a slightly less crappy web page. Now, it's back to pretty much how it was before the whole fiasco, only everything's a little tougher to find.

my thoughts and experience

[iamriley]

The are only a few real problem that I see (and have seen) with a school IT department with a lot of dependence on student workers.

(1) Students have a very limited amount of time in the department. It's like an IT shop with a really high turnover rate.

(2) The quality of student workers is very hit and miss. If a really talented student comes in and sets up a few good systems then graduates, other students are not always able to step in a maintain or update the system.

(3) The actual full-time IT workers become more paranoid and will spend a lot of time securing the network from their own workers. The high turnover along with the inevitable "bad apples" destroys trust between the full-time staff and the student workers.

That said, I still think that students should definitely have the option (or requirement, even) to work in a school IT department. For many programming students, it could be the only hardware/administration job they ever have, and it will help them understand computers on a different level.

I found my school's computer center to be a great place to gain experience. Unfortunately, since it was my first hardware tech job and it dealt exclusively with networked computers, I learned nothing about modems. Later, I took a job with a local PC shop doing tech work, and a large portion of the problems that I had to deal with were modem problems. It wasn't a big deal because I picked up on the modem stuff in a short amount of time, but it was a definite weakness after my college IT experience.

My experiences...

[devphil]

...as a student assistant sysop were most excellent.

• While the money wasn't the absolute greatest, the employers had no problems whatsoever working around my class schedule. Go figure -- my class schedule was the reason I was there!
• At 3:00 AM when we're all there working on the assignment, and somebody does Something Bad to the central server, it was very helpful to put on the "job" hat, fix it, and then go back to being a student.
• You'd better fscking believe that my code was portable. Every idea we (student assistants) came up with had to work on over a half dozen flavors of Unix, most of which nobody's ever heard of today. Many of the systems weren't "public&quot machines; they just were there to run small networks. So no cool utilities which happen to hog diskspace or require boatloads of RAM. That meant we had to learn the core common Unix tools well.
• We weren't allowed to run riot on the heavily-used systems. Basically, any systems on which professors might store data (e.g., final exams), we were by default not given the root password.

All of this has been to my benefit now that I'm working full-time. Good experience, good training. Even the professors liked it.

(I wonder if I'll be able to post this, given that /. seems determined to forget who I am...)

Slashdot youth bias?

[cowboy junkie]

It seems like lately I've been seeing story after story that basically says 'look - tech savvy kids are smarter than stupid adults!' Perhaps this is just Slashdot speaking to its target audience (which skews young I'm sure), but I have to wonder if a story like 'Students ruin school network' would ever make it to the front page.

Georgia Tech

[Erasmus Darwin]

At Georgia Tech, the main IT stuff is still handled by professionals. However, the student organization server, cyberbuzz, is student run. Personally, I think this is a good mix -- the Really Important services are handled by people who can afford to have monitoring 24/7 and such, while the less mission critical stuff gives students a chance to do IT stuff.

Student IT jobs are great

[binarybits]

I work for the University of Minnesota computer science department. I'm a part time sysadmin/webmaster. The pay and hours are good, and I've gained valuable experience.

The staff ratio is about 50/50 students to fulltimers. The students handle most of the tech support grunt work and are assigned more in depth jobs as time and ability allows. Recently I've been assigned to do almost entirely web work-- some html writing and a fair amount of CGI scripting.

I think student-run IT departments are a good thing. We get experience, the U gets cheap labor, and everyone ends up happy. The level of professionalism and the relationship between fulltimers and students has been excellent. Most of the staff are former U students, so things work out quite well.

I think I'm extremely lucky to have a job that allows me to support myself, take classes, and build my resume all at the same time. Most of my friends make less than I do for tedious grunt work. CS students today really are spoiled.

There are some issues, in the eyes of admins :(

[Heidi Wall]

They always like to have professionals to do work like this, because, rightly or wrongly, they want someone who can be held responsible for anything that goes wrong.

In an ideal world, student run IT systems would be common place, but unfortunately there are too many issues with trust and beurocratic accountability that must be overcome in the eyes of the admins, which is a real pain.

Still, I suppose that fighting this sort of discrimination and wrong headed beurocracy can result in a greater experience of the ways of the world for these students.

A good preparation for real life.
--
Clarity does not require the absence of impurities,

Student-run IT

[Spyffe]

Student-run IT is discouraged at my college, for the simple reason that we have a very progressive privacy policy (as opposed to the one described earlier) and access to student or administrative data is limited to paid personnel. Seems reasonable to me.

Student-run IT system means student root and to my college that's unacceptable.

At MIT ...

[pz]

At MIT, the main network in the combined AI Lab and Lab for Computer Science (housed at 545 Tech Square in Cambridge, Mass.) was for many years defacto run by students. Hell, much of it was invented and built by students. (I'd shudder to think about how many meters of cable I've personally run in that building.) For years, each group did it's own IT management, until a central group (CRS, Computational Resources Service) was formed to take care of the more mundane things, like making sure all the printers worked, allocating IP addresses, running cable, and the like.

Also, for many years before Project Athena started, there was SIPB, the Student Information Processing Board, which was all student-run, and provided the all-access computational facility for members of the campus. Students also ran many of the large academic computational facilities, such as the fabled EECS system (a PDP-10 which had a nasty habit of thrashing the nights before problem sets were due) used for such courses as Software Engineering, Introduction to Programming, etc.

And these things all ran well. Why? Because unlike some suit who went home at 5pm, the students had a vested interest in these systems and were available at nearly all hours. Sure there were problems, but there were some very creative answers. And the students running these systems understood the computational needs of the users -- because they had shared experiences. They knew how bad it could be when the main server died during the week before finals. They cared.

The bad part of this was that being in one of these (only sometimes paid) positions usually carried a hefty price in terms of academic performance. These students were essentially working full-time jobs in addition to taking full loads.

Is there a better solution? I'm not sure. At MIT, a paid professional staff won't be as talented as the students, won't be as dedicated, and won't be as responsive. But the community won't be taking undue advantage of them, either. For other institutions, a different answer might, naturally, be more appropriate.

- pz.

It's nice to see it finally happen.

[pb]

My school, North Carolina State University, eventually saw the light as well.

When we had Consultants running the show, they suggested using Windows NT 4.0, and we have a lot of machines running that. However, they are slow and unstable, especially with third-party add-ons for Kerberos and AFS, and they also leak memory like a sieve.

However, some students working for the University (friends of mine) worked on Linux for the realm. It has its share of problems too, because it hasn't been worked on as much as Solaris, and we don't have a lot of apps compiled in the lockers for it, but it's *far* more stable than NT ever was, and has better support for AFS and Kerberos.

Incidentally, the original reason for switching to NT was so we could have apps like Word and Excel and Powerpoint. But now we have a cluster running Citrix Metaframe that does that. And for us engineers, it's much more important that we have other apps where we *already* have licenses on the Unix side of things, or sometimes don't need licenses...

Anyhow, I hope they keep improving the Linux side of things; it's come along decently, and we owe it all to the students.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

High School

[yolto]

At my Maryland High school, the entire school network is run by students. There are several labs in different areas, each with its own Win2K server. Students set up these servers (as far as network setup), configured clients, setup policies and all of the other expected routines. Problems with IP conflicts (the school gets internet access through a Comcast cable modem, who has decided that they will have control over the DHCP server which assigns private IPs) have been handled by students, along with various other problems.

It's a good system, although most of the work is done by a very small group of students who have done some brown-nosing to get there. I originally wanted to be a part of this team, but I decided the hoops I had to jump through and the unfair hierarchy where unqualified students are given more power wasn't something I wanted to deal with.

This is one problem with letting students have full control. Power corrupts, and being given this power without necessarily having the maturity to handle it can cause some serious ego trips and other problems.


-----------------
Kevin Mitchell

Student involvement good

[shaunj]

I've found that in my experience, most of the network is managed by university employees, but most of the grunt work (network administration, tech support, etc) is managed by the students because of the cheap labor they offer. Most of the network planning and implementation is done by the university employees and management though.

My own experience...

[jd]

I was a "network officer" for one University network that shall remain forever nameless. (Ok, it actually has a name, but I just won't UMIST^h^h^h^h^h use it. :)

My experience: Politics Ruled, first, last and always.

A typical example. I wanted to run an IPv6 testbed, to gather experience on how to handle such a network. Answer: "No. It might damage our network."

Stage 2: Write a white paper, outlining how the head of the computer centre could increase the priority of his e-mail, using IPv6. The node was running within a week.

I could give other examples - there are many - on the infighting (Linux vs. Apple vs. Solaris), the politics (who can run servers? who has access to a secure system?), etc.

Nor was this the only such place such conflicts have taken place. The University of Glamorgan, at one point, banned the use of Gopher, because they wanted to have absolute central control on what outside connections people could run.

Fact is, central control of this kind seems to breed a kind of delusional paranoia usually seen in axe-wielding psychopaths.

It's my honest opinion that computer centers should have mandatory psychological check-ups, every 3-4 months, before the plebs who run them do something really stupid.