The UH Manoa Information and Technology Services Help Desk is where people go whenever they need help. People who may need help keeping access to their UH Manoa Gmail account, people who may need some assistance with something regarding Laulima, people who need any kind of software, hardware, and networking issues will call the ITS Help Desk and receive that assistance.
I currently work among the ITS Help Desk under the title of “ Information Technology Student Assistant”. While working at the help desk I will constantly be met with people who need help with things that I have never heard of before, or have experience with. As such, I am constantly in contact with a supervisor or my fellow help desk employees to work out the issue much in the same vein as top-down processing. As such, I’ve grown to become very knowledgeable when it comes to filtering out the information that must be retained and relayed versus the information that can be left out.
Currently, my role as a help desk consultant includes going through tickets in Cherwell, which is a system with which we operate around. These “tickets” include the details of an issue someone may be having. They range from requiring assistance in re-provisioning their UH account that may have been deprovisioned due to account insecurity or inactivity, to having the entirety of their classes registered for the semester not appearing on Laulima, to even having to properly reformat their hard drives. Of course, the tickets may not initially get to that point but to find the source of the problem, we continue to prod and ask questions so that we can get to the source even if it seemed completely separate from the main issue. As a result, I’ve also learned how to properly ask questions and understand what questions to ask as to when we’re helping people, the onus is on us to figure out the issue and resolve it to the best of our capabilities even if the person needing help doesn’t know what they need help with. I believe that this skill or understanding of questions will be essential in my prospective computer science career as many pitfalls I may haphazardly run into could very easily be solved by asking Google smart questions.