The ancient poet Homer wouldn’t get the technology or the tongue-in-cheek reference to the irascible pop culture icon Homer Simpson, but no doubt he would understand that all roads lead to myIthaca. After all, in the end, Odysseus voyages home to Ithaca and the faithful Penelope, avenging Gods and beating odds along the way.
Fortunately for the Ithaca College community, this journey won’t be quite so fraught with obstacles. In this, the first in a series of short articles about what you can expect as we phase in Homer, our new student information system, we will take a look at its impact on admission. We’ll look at financial aid, registrar, residential life, and student services in future articles.
If you’ve been keeping up with the Intercom, you may remember reading about how the College decided to tackle the growing problem of an aging but highly creative homegrown student information system. In our tuition-driven budget climate, we can’t afford to disappoint the savvy, create-the-option, eclectic, web-surfing student, for he or she is likely to be just the kind of student IC has long attracted. Thus Homer was born, with the promise of research and development-based upgrades to keep it current for the next couple of decades.
For prospective students, myIthaca is a virtual gateway that will allow them to imagine themselves at Ithaca College. They can customize their web tour of IC and find the information they’re looking for. Homer will allow us to grow and improve this unique product and more effectively deliver the most relevant information to prospective students.
Currently IC has a multitude of recruitment activities taking place: counselors from the Office of Admission seek the academically strong applicants; the Department of Theatre Arts is accustomed to an IC presence on Broadway; and the School of Music expects to bring in the most talented students in the country. The list goes on. With Homer’s single database campus will have much greater access to the data they need to maximize the impact of their recruiting efforts.
Homer promises to have a significant impact almost right away, as the first rollout is scheduled to take place on September 19. For the Office of Admission, well into the process of recruiting the incoming freshman class of 2006, the new system holds the promise of less paper and fewer stultifying hours entering page after page of statistics, grades, and rankings for IC’s projected 11,000 applicants.
A significant portion of IC’s applications are currently submitted via the web, using the College’s own online application. In addition to maintaining that functionality, HOMER will allow students to submit the Common Application online -- that is, the application accepted by scores of colleges nationally -- adding to students’ options of web-based applications and leveling the field with many of our most competitive institutions.
Change always brings with it a certain degree of anxiety, however. There is an air of “guarded anticipation,” as Web Admission Group member Gerard Turbide puts it regarding Homer’s rollout. “We’re already doing great stuff,” Turbide says, “and we’ll have to learn to do things differently, and re-learn procedures. But we’ll really know we’re cooking with gas when we can experience connectivity with other College entities, such as the registrar’s office, as they come online.” Right now, Turbide points out, Homer has the potential to make access to information easier for individual admission staff or counselors making it easier to respond to the needs of our prospects. “The new system will, after reporting tools are developed, allow a counselor to go directly to the web, and based on a series of prompts, find specific information he or she needs to better work with students,” he says.
Even more immediate is the benefit to counselors on recruiting trips who will find that Homer offers easy access to the web-based information they need when talking with interested high school students. Improvements in the underlying technology will allow them to use Homer’s data in many different, and more creative, contexts.
Finally, graduate studies will experience an immediate gain in the ease of its admission functions. At this time, each graduate program has its own admission system. When Homer makes the scene, graduate admissions will have the same data for each student and prospective student, will be able to lay out longitudinal studies to assess and develop more specific and targeted programs, and will be able to make recruiting strategy decisions based on data rather than intuition and instincts.
We are not going to sugar-coat Homer though, in this age of full disclosure. No one claims that the transition to Homer will be easy, or cheap. In fact, there are sure to be bumps and maybe even boulders in the road along the way. But the College has planned carefully for the financial costs, such as new staffing, if needed, and training, technical support, and project management assistance. To be sure, sometimes the changeover will seem really hard, but as the project’s executive sponsor Provost Peter Bardaglio says, “Hard doesn’t equal bad; it equals hard.”
That’s never stopped Ithaca College before. In the end, as Bardaglio observes, “Homer will make the College more competitive and better able to fulfill its mission.”
