The DOC (Drop Off Center) is a student managed specialty position at the ITS Helpdesk that repairs student owned computers. Students who work for the DOC are selected for the position based on their exemplary customer service and communication skills, and from within those ranks a student manager is selected to manage the day to day operations of the DOC, as well as hire and train new DOC students. The skills gained at the DOC are directly applicable to numerous IT positions outside of Carleton, and a great number of our former DOC workers have gone on to IT careers.
For example, Trevor Freeland, a 2019 graduate, started as a DOC worker his sophomore year, and became manager his senior year. In the process, he also received an Apple hardware certification, and created a framework for training and hiring of future DOC students. After graduation, he continued to work with ITS, and was integral in the setup of the new ticketing system that ITS switched to in early 2020. He is currently a Technical Solutions Engineer at Epic.
“Issues that students brought to the DOC were never easy to diagnosis from their first symptoms. Whether it was salvaging a student’s Comps project, or reviving a laptop a fellow student had given up hope on, the issues brought to the DOC were difficult but incredibly rewarding to solve. As well as being impactful fulling problems to solve, working at the DOC emphasized the need to find an issues root cause, the importance of paying attention to minor details and forced me to think creatively to come up with multiple solutions. All of those skills and lessons have proven invaluable in every job I’ve had since.”
Trevor Freeland ’19
Future issues of the Update will highlight other ITS student work positions and the value of those positions for recent graduates.