Business Information Systems (BIS) and Accounting professor Byron Marshall has a simple message for his students each semester: “When you learn, we all win.”
Marshall certainly backs his motto up by helping to provide his students with in-depth, hands-on experiential learning opportunities throughout their academic careers.
“When students are willing to put forth the effort, then I’m always willing to spend some extra time with them to encourage them along the way,” said Marshall.
Marshall facilitates projects for his BIS students that serve identifiable, valuable organizational functions, and involve understanding and working with today’s most relevant and exciting technologies. Many of these projects stretch out across multiple terms, usually taking place over the course of an entire school year.
Take for example some of the projects completed by the Oregon State SIM (Students of Information Management) program. As the College of Business at Oregon State prepares to move into Austin Hall this fall, students Tyler Acevedo, Alex Rooke, Kyle Copeland and Jerome Scott discovered an opportunity to get some hands-on experience through the Austin Hall ETL (Extract Transform Load) project.
“A new building means new technology, and that’s where the idea for our project came from,” said Acevedo.
Some of the new technology in Austin Hall will allow College of Business students to reserve team rooms online and use their identification cards to unlock the team room doors once they arrive. Similar functions for faculty and staff are also planned. While the registration and lock management programs will be handled by commercial packages, lists of student names and ID card details need to be consolidated and loaded into the system hourly to support operation and security.
“Someone needed to pull the data together from various sources on campus, so we stepped up to build the collection and integration components,” said Acevedo.
There were some key challenges that the team needed to overcome. This is because in scheduling the meeting rooms in Austin Hall, there will be different levels of access for particular groups of cardholders. For example, only College of Business staff and students are to be able to reserve and access rooms. The system also needs to differentiate between staff, MBA students, tutors, and club officers. Each of these groups will have their own set of rules in regard to when they can reserve or access a room. Some designations are standard registration data, but other characteristics will be housed in the College of Business’ infrastructure.
So how did the students do it? A Powershell Batch File uses SFTP (secure file transfer protocol) to retrieve text files, creates backup copies, and kicks off a stored procedure. The stored procedure ingests, cleans, and integrates the data, then updates a staging table configured to match specs from the commercial data systems. This data is then pulled into the Scheduling Management System (SMS) and the Event Management System (EMS) to help in the scheduling and planning for rooms.
Each student on the team had a different role, with everyone bringing different strengths to the project. It’s all part of the value of the learning experience, according to Marshall.
“Not only do the students get to use the tools and technologies they’ll encounter in the workplace after graduating, but they’re also learning how to work as a member of a team,” said Marshall. “The Austin Hall project likely saved the college tens of thousand dollars, but that’s a trivial amount compared to the value for the students.”
Marshall also says that students often cite these projects as helping them land their first jobs or their first promotions at work. “The Career Success Center does a great job connecting the students with employers, and our job as faculty is to give the students the skills to make them worth hiring,” said Marshall.
The students on the team said that the key takeaways for them were learning project management skills, discovering the extent to which managing security and privacy issues requires deliberate thought and effort, how complicated it can be bringing together data from disparate sources, and how power tools like batch files and database procedures can work together to create a reliable workflow.
“There’s no better opportunity for students than to get real-world experience using the same tools and technologies that are being utilized by today’s top organizations,” said Marshall. “Students who complete these projects gain an incremental advantage when entering the job market because of their hands-on experience with coding, data management and working with the same software they’ll encounter in the workplace. All other things being equal, it takes an employer about 10 seconds to decide who they’re going to hire if one applicant has experience and another doesn’t,” he said.
