Ramsey, Adam
 

 

UNCA Housing Office Resident Assignment Assistant

 

By: Adam Ramsey
Presented: May 2003
Advisor: Walt Turner
 

Problem
 

For the last two years I have worked on campus as a Resident Assistant for the Housing Office, and throughout this period I have seen several things that could be done more efficiently with the aid of computer systems. During the summer of 2002, I witnessed the complexity of the assignment process for incoming students. In the past, the Housing Office has submitted a paper form to incoming students that is used to attain their roommate preferences, which are then used in the assignment process. With several hundred students applying for residency each semester this task can be quite lengthy, especially when considering the number of students that wish to continue living on campus each year.

Project Description

In the beginning, the intent of the project was to develop a web form similar to the one currently distributed and then create a visual basic application storing all assignments, not simply the ones for the incoming students. Due to results in the testing phase (Spring Registration 2002), I was asked instead to make it possible for the Housing Office to check who had completed the form without having to attain a copy of it from Mark Walter. While I was working on the requirements of this new page, I suggested the use of this page to assist in the matching of incoming students. Soon, the second page was to query the database and return results based upon the pre-existing code set that was used in the first part of the project. Also, I allowed Housing to update an ?Assigned? field in the database so that they may not make multiple assignments for one student.

Conclusion

This project was meant to give me a better understanding of the SDLC, database design and management, and ASP. And while I learned a great deal in these areas, I learned a lot more about dealing with the needs of customers. The design and requirement phases forced me to think about how I worded my questions so that they would be productive rather than puzzling. The ability to communicate was not only limited to the Housing Office, it was very important for me to clearly identify the tasks I needed accomplished with Mark Walter, because of his role over the servers. This project also taught me a lot about scheduling and promising results on even the most modest of alterations to the project.