Financial Aid Office gets a facelift: Faster, professional service

The Financial Aid Office has initiated a completely new system to help students in and out of the office as quickly and as courteously as possible.

The new service combines several waiting-room models to improve upon the old system. There are now four "windows" – similar to those in the academic advising and bursar lobby – available with staff. These staff members, including both student and professional employees, act as a triage, filtering needs and questions to the right places to save time. If a student's need is simple, the window staff will handle it immediately. Students with more time-consuming needs are sent to different parts of the office for specific help.

Mark Hoffman, who will soon become the Associate Director of Financial Aid and Student Employment, is excited about the new system. "It allows us to serve [the students] better and more efficiently," he said. "This way we're funneling you to the right place so there isn't a big traffic jam," he added.

"Sometimes people come in and wait in line for two hours behind someone just to get told they're in the wrong place," said Hoffman. "The combination of the model we're using and the extra staff is cutting wait times and saving students a lot of trouble."

"We've seen such long wait times before, and it wasn't anything we were happy about," said Brooke Koenig, one of the professional financial aid counselors working in the office. Koenig has worked in the office since 2000, when she started her job there as a student employee. "We wanted to help our students faster and get their questions answered faster," she expressed.

Hoffman commented that a lot of the problems before the change were the result of an unbalanced student-to-staff ratio. "We keep getting more and more students every year, which is great, but there isn't enough staff to meet their demand." Peer counselors, the student employees working under the professional counselors, have been valuable in helping to alleviate the pressure.

The students working in financial aid are currently learning the new system from two professional counselors, Koenig included, and Hoffman has high hopes for them. "They're being trained by professionals now, but after several months of working, they'll be able to train other students to do the job."

There are a few problems with the new system. "It's harder to track the wait time," said Koenig. "We used to have students log in so it was easy to see how long the wait times were. Now that you don't log in, it's hard to gauge the wait time."

Koenig added, "But at the height of the lunch rush yesterday, the longest wait was 15 minutes."

Eventually, Hoffman said, the office would like to implement a scheduling system, but for now financial aid's services are available via the walk-in system only. "There are bugs to work out, we're still getting through them," said Hoffman. "But by next fall we will have all the kinks out and will have everything running smoothly. We got one comment already from a graduate student who said this was the best service he's had in years."