IU Indy: The Student Experience for Staff

Situation

As part of our work with the IU Indianapolis Division of Enrollment Management, we were trying to build a team experience that also increased true student empathy. This was challenging given the number of staff involved and the different responsibilities of the offices. We needed to come up with an experience that would allow staff from Admissions to better understand the challenges faced by staff from the Financial Aid Office, and the Registrar's Office, and the Office of Veterans and Military Personnel, etc.

Solution

We built a three-part agenda for an afternoon retreat involving everyone in the division. The first part of the agenda consisted of directors from each office describing succinctly (under a strict 10-minute time limit!) their primary responsibilities, emphasizing ways that those responsibilities both impacted the student experience and overlapped with other offices in the division.

Then we announced that everyone in the room would spend the rest of the afternoon going through this student experience personally! Underneath each chair was taped an envelope with an assignment. Each person was either:

• A student (about half of those in attendance) with an assigned GPA, major, and financial aid situation (how much money their family had available for them to go to college); or

• A staff member assigned to one of the offices in the division with instructions about what to do when students came to them.

Then those assigned as staff members were dismissed to the next room to report to their assigned table where they had instructions. The assigned students were then instructed to:

• Go through the admissions process based on their GPA and desired major and collect an admission letter;

• Then go through the financial aid process based on their financial status and collect money through scholarship and other aid (bills with the profiles of our mascots of course!)... or through student loans, in which case they were given a faux-promissory note!

• Then go through class via the Registrars office, ultimately collecting a diploma, or as we called it, a "dip-no-ma"!

We watched as everyone went through the activity, then gathered everyone for the final part of the agenda where we held an open forum to reflect on what everyone had experienced.

Success

The event turned out to be an enormous success! The concluding discussion was incredibly enlightening. We highlighted comments that we heard throughout the activity such as:

• "Where do I start?"

• "I have to wait in line?"

• "I'll just take the money and run!"

• "How do I get Pell?"

• "Can you just tell me what this means?"

In fact, staff hear comments and questions from students all the time, but to suddenly be in the situation where they were asking the same questions was sobering!

We pointed out how some staff lingered through the experience and really enjoyed it, while others zipped through as quickly as possible, and still others seemed stressed out by it. We see this range in students all the time. We also highlighted how some students just had a lot of money and had no problem navigating that process, while others didn't have much at all. We asked about how they felt collecting a promissory note and the accompanying debt, and even though it was not binding in any way, staff described how reluctant they were to do that and how it suddenly made a lot more sense emotionally how students talk to them about this.

We talked about incidents in the experience, how some of the staff took charge and started giving directions right away, even though some of those directions were inadvertently wrong! We talked about how they realized and tried to fix that. Another highlight was the bottlenecks we created at different points in the process and how frustrating that was even in the moment of a manufactured exercise, let alone in the real world for real students.

We finished our discussion by talking at length about the vast range of student experience and the importance of displaying true empathy toward them. Staff felt that the event had a direct impact on their service to students.

And of course to conclude, we had graduation cookies from a local bakery!