Graduate Aid Redesign Project
Course 6 Meeting (02/10/2000)

February 10, 2000

Course 6: GARP Project Team Meeting Notes

Attendees:

1. Lisa Bella, EECS
2. Peggy Carney, EECS
3. Shawn Dunn, SSIT
4. Maria Fernandez, SSIT
5. Susan Guralnik, EECS
6. Leo Larson, SSIT
7. Lucille O’Hehir, EECS
8. Marilyn Pierce, EECS
9. Helen Schwartz, EECS
10. Norm Wright, SSIT

Agenda:

The meeting goal was to:

• Discuss the project goals and schedule

• Discuss the business process by which Course 6 decides and processes student funding in the form of FE, RA and TA.
• Discuss their current problems.
• Discuss the possibility of having a direct feed from their system to Grad Aid (EECS redesigned their entire system with an Oracle backend and use PowerBuilder for the user interface).

General Overview:

Course 6 has 825 Graduate Students. Roughly 100 students receive fellowships per term, 110 students receive TA’s per term and 500 RA appointments are processed per term. For Course 6, this is a very labor-intensive process since they enter the same data in their departmental system and on MITSIS. Given the volume of the appointments, the reconciliation process is very time consuming. This problem is even bigger given the fact that the bulk of their appointments come in the form of a Research Assistantship. RA’s are entered on MITSIS, charged to a dummy account that is later reversed by Payroll. The appointment information is basically managed/entered by three people: the grad administrator that enters the data on MITSIS and on EECS’s system, Payroll, person in EECS responsible for entering SANDI adjustments (again this information is maintained in two systems: Payroll and EECS).

Course 6 Major Problems:

• Speed: Given the large volume of data that they process, it is very important for them to have a system that processes the data fast.
• Registration information is not the same across the board (we need to get some examples and have a short meeting with JoAnne and Mary Callahan to figure out why?).
• Tuition charges going to Administrative Staff suspense account.
• Double charges (to suspense and research account)

Would like to have…

• Appointment load from their system to MITSIS to eliminate double data entry
• Incorporate proration tables in the new design (this will facilitate the appointment termination process).
• For TA’s – having accessibility to subject load tables (check if load tables or enrollment data).
• Be able to enter a % and get an amount and vice versa.
• A flexible system that will allow to enter appointments that are different from the standard.
• Professor and Advisor information
• Sponsor information – extremely important for reporting purposes.
• A speedy system that can handle traffic at peak times!
• AN INTEGRATED SYSTEM WITH PAYROLL!

Next Steps:

• Helen Schwartz will contact us so that we can meet and look at the data structures of the new-redesigned EECS System.
• EECS will provide us the "funding models" they currently have.

Date last modified: 2/22/2000 by the GARP Team