tips for supervisors

The information below is aimed at supervisors, helping them to get a great start to that term's campus service. It is posted here for the sake of transparency and is open to suggestions from anyone on how to make the start-up process better. Email me if you have any comments, ideas, or questions, plummer@ncssm.edu.

First Meeting with New Students

Email your campus service students before the start of the quarter/semester to let them know where and when you're holding your first campus service meeting or how you want them to get started with campus service. Not every supervisor holds a big meeting for all students since it can be tricky to make sure everyone is available then. If you want them to bring their laptops, schedules, or anything else specific for this meeting, please remind them to do so! 

Topics to cover in your first meeting with your student(s):

• Who you are: give them some background information about who you are, what you do at NCSSM, how long you've been at NCSSM
  
  

• Who they are: have students introduce themselves so you and the rest of the group can learn everyone's names
  
  

• Your hopes for their time in your campus service assignment: what skills they'll pick up, how they'll see their work in the big picture of how our campus runs. You should explain what you appreciate about working with campus service students, what you get out of participating, what you hope they get out it, etc. Really thinking through this part proactively and feeling confident about it can really get students excited and bought into your campus service assignment.
  
  

• How they can best get in touch with you: email, phone, chat, whichever you prefer. Make it clear that you would much rather hear from them sooner rather than later if something comes up re: campus service.
  
  

• What students will do in your campus service assignment: types of tasks, times they can work, and how they and/or you document their time worked
  
  

• Your expectations: how and when they'll communicate any issues with you, miscellaneous requirements for campus service, what students should do if they're missing campus service. Check Guidelines for more specific details.
  
  

• What happens if they miss campus service: when they can expect to hear from you (ideally, whenever they're missing any time, don’t wait until it ‘becomes a problem’), when you'll contact the campus service coordinator, how the campus service coordinator will communicate any issues with them (via email or in-person meeting, and will notify their family).

Tracking Hours

You have a lot of freedom and flexibility for how you want to track your students’ hours completed/missed/excused, but whatever system you set up should be easy for you to use and to share accurate numbers with students, their support team and the campus service coordinator. If you just need somehere to start, this "Hours Tracker" sheet might be helpful. (More instructions below!)

Depending on how many students you have, I would recommend creating a Google Calendar just for campus service so you can map out their weekly hours and see it alongside your calendar so that you know when to expect them. You can also invite students to those weekly hours from that Google Calendar which will help them with remembering campus service in their day-to-day. Have their campus service hours separate from your work calendar has a few benefits:

• You can turn off that calendar/layer when you do not need to see campus service appointments.

• You can edit a student’s timeslot and add ‘completed’, ‘missed’, or ‘excused’ for that day’s event to keep a running tally of hours completed/owed.

For altered schedule weeks or extended weekends that impact your campus service schedule, you should talk proactively with students so that you know everyone is on the same page re: expectations. For some supervisors, it does not matter if Monday is a Friday schedule and they still need student help that day while for others, trying to reschedule all of their Tuesday campus service hours because of a required meeting/altered schedule wouldn’t be worth it and they decide to just excuse those hours.

You should figure out what system works best for you. For SAB campus service, I would fill in the time missed each week and then email students when they had any hours missing. The "HOURS MISSING" column made it easy to see which students needed to be contacted; it was just a sum of all of the columns to the right and I used Conditional Formatting on that column to highlight any tallies higher than zero in red.