For those of you who are new to Illinois Tech, you may have noticed that a lot of workers on campus are at the desks, in the gym (where I work), and even in the Commons, who are all student workers. While this is not really unnatural for a college campus, you’ll notice that we, as student workers, take on a lot of different roles around campus, including some that you’d think students shouldn’t be in charge of. I, for instance, work as a Building Supervisor at Keating Sports Center, where most evenings when I work, I am the highest-ranking member of the staff. I hold the keys to most doors, am in charge of closing procedures, making sure other workers are doing their jobs, and most of all, ensuring the safety of all patrons through rule compliance and standard athletics safety practices.
It’s not uncommon to run into a student worker on campus. Commons workers like the table cleaners, food servers, and even other background staff oversee keeping our food service areas running. They make sure we eat, though they admittedly lack in portion serving skills sometimes. The food service workers throughout campus are not just there to serve food and clean tables; they make sure we have a functioning organizational system of food reservations across campus, accommodating organization requests for buffet-style meals as seen at some org events, or even providing food for administrative meetings, like the times I would meet with President Raj Echambadi for Student Government-related meetings.
Some student workers on campus are more administrative, such as those working with the Office of Student Life, Events Services, and other residence or academic-related offices. These workers do a lot for our university, making sure that these offices can meet the demand of services such as event reservations, room requests, or even financial aid requests. While they are important to maintaining certain parts of this campus, sometimes they do lack the effort needed for the department they work for, or even the experience needed to do their tasks. That is a critique purely based on the selection process for these workers, which lacks the rigor needed for the position they are hired for. But, at the end of the day, they help our campus continue to function the way it should, to an extent.
Finally, there are the workers in the Athletics Department, Library, and others who supply supplementary services for students on campus. People, like myself, in the athletics department, help students with the tasks in these respective departments. These are the jobs where the student workers excel in their position, at least in my opinion. These jobs require little experience and skill when learning how to do them, which means those hired do not really need to jump through many hoops. The further irony about these jobs is that the workers in these jobs across campus tend to get more positive reviews by students than many other jobs. They are also the least recognized on campus and tend to glide right under the radar of many administrators.
Student workers across campus will vary in job performance, and that is an objective fact of hiring student workers who also need to dedicate their time to classwork. There are also many drawbacks to hiring student workers for registrar-related issues, or even in certain positions of the Office of Technology Services. In my opinion, the university should seriously re-evaluate what positions should be available to students, who are generally inexperienced in many of these positions. Many students don’t exactly want to be dedicated to setting up a soccer field or putting paper in printers all day, but they do fill in the crucial service gaps that would exist without student workers on campus. They may not be perfect, but we need these student workers, and while the university should really be changing its hiring process for these workers so that they don’t hire folks who lack the skills or ambition needed for certain positions, they help make sure our little grid city works as well as possible.