UMD OIA Part-Time Job

Introduction

In fall 2016, in my sophomore year of undergraduate studies at the University of Maryland (UMD), I began looking for a part-time job on campus as I wanted to start my employment experiences off “on the right foot.” I felt that an on-campus job would be a great learning experience regarding how jobs work while not being so stressful as to take my focus off academics.

I joined UMD’s Office of International Affairs (OIA) in October 2016. One of OIA’s main jobs is to manage the study abroad programs at the university; this includes processes like corresponding with foreign universities to discuss housing, courses, and transportation during the programs, sending out and filling official forms regarding program budgets, and collecting receipts from faculty and students following the programs for accounting purposes.

When I joined, OIA were working on a permanent move to a new building. As part of this process, all the files regarding study-abroad programs that had been stored in their previous office — which filled two whole large cabinets — also had to make the move. However, those files, some of which had been untouched since as far back as 2010, were largely unorganized. OIA saw this move as a great opportunity (1) to reorganize all the study-abroad files and (2) explore the possibility of creating an electronic database for smoother file lookup, as previously they had been manually searching the cabinet for files of interest. Both of these tasks were the focus of my work in my role as a records management assistant.

Takeaways

• Organization of a large set of data
• Inventory management
• Database management

Conclusion

This was the first job I had ever had, so I learned a lot about logistics: the dynamics of offices, how teams are set up to complete tasks, the forms one has to fill out.

In addition, I learned how to approach designing a new system. I developed a new digital organizational system from scratch, to completely reorganize a large, outdated, and heterogeneous collection of paper records. By the time I left the position 1.5 years later, I had created a system by which file lookup electronically was straightforward, simple, and learnable in a matter of minutes. This saved the OIA team a significant amount of time, no longer having to sift through dozens of dusty papers in an old cabinet.