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Campus Research Computing Consortium (CaRCC)

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CaRCC Nexus Student Workforce 11 April, 2023

Anita Orendt and Betsy Hillery

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carcc.org rcd-nexus.org

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Agenda

  • Welcome
  • Nexus Student Survey Updates- Anita
  • Student Program presented by Northwestern
  • Student Onboarding
  • Next Time - Combine Mentoring Discussion

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Student Survey

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https://forms.gle/XTxBKbA82i3Zytkp7

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Student Program Presentation

Northwestern University

Research Computing Services

Scott Coughlin

Alper Kinaci

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Outline

  • Summary of the Student Program
  • Planning Student Program Budget
  • Student Responsibilities
  • Student Program Procedures
    • Hiring
    • Onboarding
    • Managing
  • Communicating Impact
  • Lessons Learned

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Student Program Summary

Northwestern IT - Research Computing

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  • 2016: 4 students
  • 2023: 21 students on three tracks
    • Data Science Support
    • Computing Support
    • Infrastructure
  • 2016-2023: 56 students

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Student Program Summary

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Student Program Summary

More information can be found on the following pages

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Summary: How did we get here?

  • Incremental growth and improvement
  • "From zero to one": Get it off the ground
  • "From one to three": Time to build best practices
    • Hiring, onboarding and managing practices, diversity
  • "Four+, can't keep track": Building a programmatic approach
    • Student Hiring Handbook
    • Student Onboarding Handbook
    • Senior students onboarding/mentoring new students
    • Student career arc? Sr and Lead roles? Compensation?

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Planning Student Program Budget

  • Northwestern IT - Operational Budget: 17 positions
    • Data Team Funding: Estimate budget based on number of consults, trainings, faculty projects per year, not by how many students.
    • Computing and CI Funding: Estimate budget based on current number of students + expected additional students at a set rate of hours.
  • The Graduate School - Graduate Assistantship: 3 positions
    • This is justified because students will be working on research projects with faculty members at the University.
  • Year-Up Internship: 1 position
    • Internship aimed to reduce opportunity divide for young adults.

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How Do the Hours Work?

  • Hourly positions
    • Data Science: Total 0-30 hours/week - students volunteer for consults and trainings
    • Computing and Infrastructure: Fixed shifts during workdays up to 10 hours a week per student.
  • Graduate Assistantship positions
    • 20 hours per week per student
  • Year-Up Internship position
    • Full-time for six months

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Student Responsibilities

  • Data Science Students
    • Consults that relate to a specific programming problem, i.e. R, Matlab, Python. These skills impact hiring decisions.
  • Computing Support Students
    • Day to Day: Tickets, account management, documentation review and editing, consults
    • Longer Term: Generating content for trainings, workshops, and YouTube How-To videos as well as supporting staff projects.
  • Infrastructure Students
    • System facing operations and projects like adding new storage to allocations, changing permissions, backend development etc.

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Student Program Procedures: Hiring

Hiring handbook: A comprehensive set of tasks and processes for end-to-end student hiring

  • Job descriptions
  • Compensation
  • Advertisement venues and contacts
  • Email communications and offer letters 
  • Interview process, steps and timelines
    • Screening criteria
    • Questions
    • Evaluation rubric

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Student Program Procedures: Onboarding

  • Onboarding Checklist
    • Lists all administrative and logistical tasks such as required access to systems and tools, 1-1 meetings, weekly schedule etc.
  • Onboarding Learning Document
    • New student roadmap containing the learning content produced by the team
    • Knowledge Base for initial ramp up and reference for solving problems later

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Student Program Procedures: Managing

  • As the group gets larger, schedules and availability will fluctuate a lot.
    • Scheduling weekly group and 1-1 meetings is tricky
    • More staff members should share the student mentoring and project guidance
    • Student peer mentoring is useful but hard to achieve
    • Aspirational: Conducting regular performance reviews with the students and tying it into pay increases

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Communicating Impact

  • Early on, it is important to communicate the impact to leadership by metrics, highlights and anecdotes separately
  • Regular shoutouts for their achievements on Teams, Slack etc
  • Blog posts and newsletter articles highlighting student contribution
  • Annual and/or semi-annual reports on tickets, training, consult metrics, project work and publications

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Benefits to Students

“Being a Student Consultant has exposed me to more fields of research and methods than I ever thought possible. This has greatly expanded my interests and has allowed me to explore countless new ideas.”

“Working in this position teaches me a lot about how to communicate efficiently… I think learning ways to alleviate the information gap is valuable because there are often two cases: either I don’t have enough background information to locate their issue, or I make too many assumptions without considering the audience’s background.”

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"The mentorship I’ve received as a Student Consultant for RCS has made me more than a better informatician, it’s made me a better colleague to my labmates and a better communicator in all the professional circles I exist in now."

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"… It feels so rewarding when figuring out how to solve an issue, and every time it is a new adventure. Learning to navigate through the information given requires time and accumulation of knowledge …" 

“Not only is data science consulting incredibly rewarding, but it also made me a better, faster, more versatile coder.” 

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Lessons Learned

  • Spend time to understand individual skills, aspirations, drivers and time they have. Assign work accordingly
  • Pay attention to both technical and soft skill development
  • School work is always first. Build lots of flexibility in your plans. Silo-ed work and offboarding are challenging
  • Expect to spend significant time to administration
  • Share student responsibility as student team grows
  • Employ different student support models (floating or fixed hours, graduate assistantship, internship etc) for different service needs

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Lessons Learned (cont)

  • Expand outreach channels and simplify job listing language to diversify the candidate pool
  • Inexperienced/junior students are great to find your blind spots

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Student Onboarding

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Student Onboarding Elements

  • Hiring Process - (Mentor and Student)
    • Job Descriptions
    • Pay Scale
    • Student Request process (SAP) System
    • Add to systems
    • Entering Time
  • Separation process
  • Performance Evaluation Process / Setting Goals
  • Pay Increase process
  • Weekly Status Reports
  • Tools Used

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What is missing?

Volunteers to formalize an artifact to give back.

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Future

Mentoring Topic with the Staff Team?

Volunteers to head that up.

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Discussion