Moving on up
There is an extra “ding” in the elevator for RO Student Services team members now as they listen to the elevator go past the tenth floor and up to the eleventh. The Office of the Registrar (RO) is no longer dispersed across two floors and instead all team members are together on the top floor of ECM.
With the continuation of work remote agreements, Admissions and the RO were able to make a collaborative decision to best utilize space for the whole of DEM. The Office of Admissions and Recruitment (OAR) will now be able to utilize the additional space on the 10th floor to accommodate a growing staff and increase in-person presence this year. The move will also allow OAR to reinvision the use of their current space to better meet the needs of the office.
The move to a singular floor, while laborious, provided the RO with the opportunity to be intentional about what was moving and purge decades of different types of unnecessary documents. Members of Student Services met with UW Archives to gain guidance about what types of documents, publications, and historical information the RO could donate to the archives. This meeting also allowed team members to confirm and clarify compliance with records and retention schedules. The RO has a large quantity of records and work is still ongoing to inventory catalogs, bulletins, and other official publications that will be officially housed in UW Archives going forward. In addition to campus information, the RO also reviewed and purged decades of personal records from previous employees and student data that is no longer necessary to retain. Likewise, team members took the time to safely transport important record cards for hundreds of non-computerized records.
But wait, that was just moving and organizing records and documents, RO team members still had to tackle the physical move. FP&M, building services, SWAP, DoIT, an electrician, communications, and furniture vendors all needed to coordinate the move of furniture, dispose of trash, coordinate swap bins, and let people know the front office moved. In total there were 400 unused items sent to swap. Ally Bartelme, Katie Block, Angie Rieves, and Beth Warner used their amazing leadership and management skills to organize the move and coordinate all the different moving parts.
While there are still a few things that need to happen – the RO will hopefully be getting a new front desk in place sometime in the Fall semester – everyone is enjoying the new space and the views of the lake.