Midwest to West Coast Collaboration to Build Onboarding
In April, Client Services Coordinator Ally Bartelme met with Martina Ubaldo of UC-Santa Barbara to discuss all things student employees.
This connection was established through Katie Block, who formerly worked at the UCSB Financial Aid Office. Martina is the current Advisor who oversees the Peer Program. The Peer Program at UCSB is a robust, highly-developed student employee program that is serving as a benchmark for the UW–Madison RO Student Employee Program. The UCSB Peer Program has a large emphasis on developing transferable skills, community within the peer program, and strong customer service.
Ally was initially interested in learning about onboarding and training processes, team structure, student employee development, and how student employees work with full time staff. Martina was able to shed light on many of these topics and more.
Learning about the Peer Program structure is particularly useful to Ally as the RO is currently working on growing and expanding its student team and the work it does. Martina demonstrated the structure of the Peer Program, specifically how students are able to “specialize” and work with full time staff on various Financial Aid projects. The students enjoy working closely with advisors and learning more in-depth Financial Aid processes, and the advisors love having the students learn and help. Martina was also able to share onboarding resources, handbook materials and training guides, which can be used in the RO Student Employee Program.
Martina also shared how their Peer Program has adapted to supporting student employees in the pandemic world. It had many similarities to how the RO and other front-line services teams at UW have adapted to supporting their students as well. Utilizing Zoom, chat, and virtual staff meetings is now the new normal, and the student employees both at UCSB and UW have proven to be resilient, adaptable and dependable in this new virtual environment.
Ally has also been undertaking collaborative efforts with other offices at UW–Madison who have robust student employee programs as an effort to learn about the programs and coordinate front-line services accordingly. These UW and non-UW partnerships will not only help aid the expansion of the RO Student Employee Program, but also help in developing Ally’s role as Client Services Coordinator. This connection with UCSB will allow the RO an additional level of collaboration to connect with and learn from a non-UW-Madison institution. Ally is looking forward to a continued partnership with Martina and her student team, and Martina is excited to continue to be a sounding board for the RO.