Instead of feeling like lovestruck teenagers waiting by the phone, resident assistants can now feel like doctors in the emergency room.
Under a revised system implemented this semester, residents will now contact RAs via pager rather than on room phones.
If paged, RAs will head to commons rooms to meet students in need of help from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m.
In addition to freeing RAs from the confines of their rooms, the new system allows students to memorize one reliable number.
The idea for the pager system originated from a conversation with RAs and Graduate Residents and was first tested in Edens Quadrangle last spring, said Joe Gonzalez, associate dean of residence life.
The pagers will address a number of problems with the old system, Gonzalez explained, keeping on-duty information accurate and allowing residents to reach on-call RAs at all times, even when those RAs are out on rounds.
"There were instances where residents called the wrong person or students got no answer when they called an RA's room phone," Gonzalez said.
Administrators at first tried to revise the system by providing RAs with cell phones instead of pagers, said Paul Naglieri, residence coordinator for Kilgo Quadrangle.
"We found that cell phones did not always get good coverage, so we switched to pagers, which we found always worked in any area," Naglieri said.
He added that though "no system is going to be perfect," RAs benefit greatly from being able to spend more time talking to students and addressing problems without having to worry about being in their rooms to answer their phones.
The effectiveness of the new system may differ between campuses because on East, an RA is assigned to several dorms each night, and on West one RA is responsible for only one quad.
Junior Priscilla Hwang, an RA in Kilgo, said the pager system gave her more flexibility.
"Last year, we had to be in our rooms all night. Now we can go to the commons and watch TV [or] we can go to print papers on ePrint," she said.
"We couldn't do any of that before," Hwang added.
Despite addressing many of the old system's problems, there are some RA's who are not satisfied with the pager method.
The pagers cause logistical problems, said senior Tony Manela, a third-year RA living in Wilson Dormitory.
"At any one time I will have three pagers on my belt, and they're not well-labeled," he explained. "I won't know immediately which building I need to respond to, I won't know how serious it is."
The system is not very efficient and forces RAs to spend a lot of time on small issues, Manela added.
He said telephone contact allowed him to deal with these difficulties in a more timely fashion, citing a past experience when a resident's problem was fixed over the phone.
Manela anticipated problems arising on East Campus because RAs have to move between different dorms when on call.
Hwang said the new system could be a major improvement on West Campus, however, adding that having one number that residents can always call is a great resource.
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