3,944 hours saved: all in a day's work

The following article by Deidra Urbonas appears in the latest issue of the Inside sCo-op newsletter

Meet Merwyn – motivated, meticulous, and memorable.

After 80 job applications on JobMine, and receiving three interviews, Merwyn Rosario, a 2B Mathematics/Chartered Accountancy student, realized he had to take explicit action. The last day to secure a job was quickly approaching, and the pressure was on. In this situation, some might have enrolled for another academic term or taken the term off. Instead, Merwyn took a proactive approach to finding his own job; a pretty big deal for a first-time co-op student.

Although he described the process as scary, Merwyn kept calm. He attended a career development seminar, the Professional Futures Conference, provided by the School of Accounting and Financial Management. He said this conference was valuable, as it provided information on networking, establishing a role in a work environment, and developing a personal brand. It also got Merwyn strategizing on how he could secure his own job.

“One of the key reasons I figured I hadn’t been able to secure a job was because I didn’t have a wide enough network,” Merwyn said. He had tried emailing companies his résumé, but he found more success in using his existing network of family and friends. “This helped me find the key contact that I needed,” he said. He learned of an opportunity at IA Clarington Investments Inc, a wealth management firm that specializes in investment solutions, and he set up an interview immediately.

Finding an Edge

The conference taught Merwyn the importance of demonstrating knowledge of the company during an interview. “The first thing I did was research IA Clarington to find out what they do,” he said. “I also researched leaders within the organization and learned about their contributions.” This gave him an edge in his interview. “It allowed me to demonstrate what I knew about the company and that I was interested in their business.”

Inspired by the conference, Merwyn was enthusiastic to develop his own brand, which required not only selling his skills, but also explaining how he could be a proper fit in the company. Because he faced the challenge of persuading a company that had never hired a co-op student that they needed him, Merwyn took this advice seriously. “I had to convince them that they needed to hire me as a co-op student over any other candidates,” he said. Merwyn succeeded, because he was extended a job offer on the final day to secure a work term commitment.

Despite an agonizing hour and a half commute (each way!) Merwyn was motivated to make a lasting impression. Starting a month later than most other students, he felt the need to catch up. “I felt like I was lagging one month behind my peers,” he said.

This got him thinking about how he could make a big impact in a short time.

When he started at IA Clarington, his supervisor was unsure of what specific work Merwyn could complete. Merwyn exceeded everyone’s expectations by improving the company’s entire system for analyzing reports. In fact, he was able to develop a macro system whereby the original completion time of 15 minutes was cut down to two minutes. With roughly 70 reports received every day, Merwyn essentially saved the company 3,944 hours (or 236,640 minutes) annually!

Merwyn enjoyed developing the customizable macro programs. “I know that they are going to use them every single day,” he said.

Taking Care of Business

What started off as a Reports Analyst position turned into a revolutionary role with the Operations and Processes Team.

Not only did Merwyn transform the way IA Clarington handled their investment reports, he also automated processes for funds assessments, gain/loss reports and client service reports.

For his first work term, Merwyn had to secure his own job, outside of JobMine.

He also worked under the pressures of tax season, developed his own path in the company, and saved the company countless hours of work. Merwyn also gained an understanding of a corporate work environment – both the work itself and the culture.

“Through this whole process,” Merwyn said, “I learned the importance of networking. By the end of the work term I exceeded my expectations for the number of contacts I would have, because working within one company substantially increased my number of contacts.”

Although Merwyn faced a stressful start to his first co-op term, he succeeded in making a lasting impact on a company that was also new to co-op. Evidently, the risk paid off for both Merwyn and IA Clarington. Merwyn plans to return to the firm for his next work term.

Inside sCo-op can be read in PDF form here, and is also available on issuu.

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New names for Downtown Health Sciences buildings; other notes

Changes have been made to the building names at the Downtown Health Sciences Campus. The building occupied by the McMaster University Michael DeGroote School of Medicine, the UW School of Optometry clinic and the private medical clinic operated by Dr. Joe Lee will now be referred to as the Integrated Health Building (IHB). The building occupied by the School of Pharmacy will be called simply Pharmacy (PHR). Note that these are the official names of the buildings and should be used in all university publications and web sites.

There is more news on the web redesign front. The Waterloo CMS project now has an implementation team as it moves into a new phase of pilot implementation. The team members and their roles are: Jeff Voskamp (IST) - System Administrator, Kris Olafson (Student Life) - Web Developer, Lauren Harrison (Housing and Residences) - Drupal Themer/Web Designer, Heather Wey (IST) - User Interface Design, Training and Support Specialist, Chris Carignan (IST) - Junior Web Developer/Administrator, and Eva Grabinski (IST) - Project Manager. The implementation team will be responsible for the daily work involved in getting Drupal up-and-running to support the university’s websites - replacing Dreamweaver and Contribute with Drupal as the centrally supported website management technology at the university. More details can be found here.

Four Drupal pilot projects are in the works. The recently-formed Web Content Management implementation team will be working on pilot implementations for Housing, Web resources, the main university page, and Student Life.

SharePoint is coming... IST will soon be providing a SharePoint 2010 Foundation production system. The plan is to also create a SharePoint 2010 server, providing that service to those who need it. These activities will continue into the Fall term.

...and Bookit is going. Oracle Calendar, or Bookit as it is known on campus, is going to be replaced by Exchange Calendar, likely in November 2010. IST is "looking at ways to move Bookit data to Exchange Calendar." Training for the new program will start in October. This project is associated with the overall move to Exchange 2010, which is currently ongoing. Why the change? "The web experience for Exchange calendar is much better with Exchange 2010 than it was with the previous version," says an update from IST.

Dude, your Dell's getting replaced! "Academic support departments that participate in the desktop rollover program will be getting new computers to replace any Dell GX620 currently in use by FTE staff." says a statement from IST. "These GX620s are approaching 5 years old." IST will be asking the computer support reps in affected departments to "do some testing" before the workstations are deployed with Windows 7, citing the need to check if any special purpose applications will in fact run in Windows 7.

The Federation of Students has approved its 2010/2011 budget. The budget, approved unanimously on Sunday, features a 22 per cent increase over last year, including $52,042.53 allocated to the federation's services and $41,732.65 in additional funds for marketing efforts. The complete budget can be read in Excel here. Also, contrary to what was reported last week, the Bombshelter Pub is in fact open this week for lunch from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. I recommend the beef dip.

Quest will not be available tomorrow morning. From about 7:00 a.m. to noon on Thursday, Quest will be unavailable while new security patches are applied.

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