A few years ago, we stood in line as eager freshmen to receive that guarantee for every student: a laptop. If you were enrolled as any major that didn’t start with “Music” or “Art”, you received the 17-inch behemoth of a computing machine. You spent your first year making up designs in SolidWorks and doing your (or someone else’s) Intro to Programming homework on the HP laptop.
Fast forward to today. Your once powerful machine has become a shell of its former self. It acts as your personal heat source as you attempt to connect to the internet on the new and improved Stevens network. Your battery, if you have the original one, is now dead weight attached to your load or barely holds a charge past five seconds of “What Does the Fox Say”.
Maybe you have moved past the Technology Fee funded laptop and bought one of your own. Congratulations, you lucky son of a gun. It is blazing fast, but now you have to register your MAC address and connect to the servers which have all of the student licensed software you need to finish your testing for Senior Design.
We find ourselves in classrooms that are ill-equipped with the necessities of technology based majors. Yes, we have our large lecture halls in EAS and BC 122 that provide an outlet and Ethernet port (although these ports are becoming obsolete), for every seat. However, there are still classrooms where electrical outlets are few and far between.
How did it all come to this? Your original laptop was supposed to last you through your years here at the Innovation University. We should come to expect more of our learning environment. I know that measures are being taken to improve the infrastructure, but it seems that it has been lagging behind for three years now. Many of you have had to apply for housing using a system whose preferred web browser is as old as a high school freshman. If you have been to Pierce, which I believe almost everyone has, you may have had to wait almost a minute for your freshly minted student ID to register with the card scanner, relay information to the servers, and then finally tell the attendant that you do indeed have enough swipes for the rest of the day.
As a student of an Institute of Technology, I have come to expect more from our technology. Since freshman year, our smartphones have improved greatly, yet it took until this year to bump the internet speeds up to a manageable rate and increase the coverage so you at least have a wireless connection in your own room. We finally have card readers for clubs so that no one can fudge their membership numbers and exploit the student activity fund. Perhaps my expectations are too high, but with all these statistics about how great Stevens is being published, maybe the paradigm I have is correct.
Sent from my battery-less heat sink.
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