As with all of you, Instructional and Informational Technologiesrn(IIT) at Penn State Schuylkill have been hit with budget cuts andrnlimited staffing, while our request for services and support haverngrown. The response no one wants to hear to his or her request isrnNO, so this has called for some resourceful times. We only have arnfull-time staff of 4 on our campus to support approximately 1,100rnstudents and 250 faculty and staff. This has resulted in usrnsuccessfully turning to our educational departments for assistance.rnWe have been able to turn our request and challenges into projectsrnfor our Information Science & Technology (IST) students. Wernhave utilized them for small LAN design projects, SoftwarernApplications, testing of security on a wireless LAN and severalrnminor projects. IST student interns are also used to supplementrnour staff when we know we have a large volume of work to berndone. This summer we are looking at a campus wide wirelessrnrollout, possible assumption of our ResCom network, re-cablingrnprojects as well as our annual recycling of computers in the labs.rnThese will all have a high utilization of student labor. Thesernstudents have come away with a greater knowledge than theyrnwould normally get in a classroom environment by actuallyrngetting to do what they are learning about and we essentiallyrndouble our staff size and accomplish more than we wouldrnnormally be able to do. The faculty loves the idea of the hands onrnpractice and them actually putting something into a productionrnenvironment.
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