Starting university is an exciting time in the life of any new student. All new students starting at City University are required to register online prior to in-person registration. It is an extremely busy time for the university staff who work hard over the summer months to ensure that the experience of every new student is as positive as possible during both registrations.
We are very pleased to say that this year’s online registration and in-person registration was the most successful support operation since online registration was instigated. More people registered in advance and there were fewer help calls than ever. In total during the main week, 21-25 September, 4164 students registered with 2684 people who completed on-line registration. Based on the information in ServiceNow, the university’s IT service system, we closed about a thousand incidents and various registration related items, which was a great success. Well done to all supporting services who made the student experience great this year by working extra hard during registrations period.
Information Services also participated in Fresher’s Week in September, including Fresher’s Fair, which was attended by over 5000 students. There was a high volume of traffic throughout the day with a long queue of students trying to get into the hall. This was an opportunity for IT to provide new students with relevant and useful information and key messages in their first week at University. We were also able to advise students about IT quick reference guides and password registrations. All of this information was provided on leaflets, which students found very helpful.
Additionally, this year Information Services ran our own stall for the first time, which was met with a lot of enthusiasm and interest from the students. Several thousand of students engaged with the stall to learn about our services, with over a thousand winning small lucky dip prizes. We encouraged students to play the lucky dip game for a chance to win either a USB stick, a phone charger or print credit. We promoted a treasure hunt game and handed out questionnaires to students to fill in for a chance to win an IPad or Apple Watch. The treasure hunt received wide participation, with 2 grand prizes winners and over twenty students winning runner up prizes. Winners were announced via Twitter, which gave us the opportunity to promote our ITSD Twitter account. As a result our number of followers had significantly increased after the event. This is an excellent news for our department.
