With the arrival of Fall quarter come the usual changes on campus – quiet campus walkways turn into bustling thoroughfares, parking spaces once plentiful are full by 9 AM, large crowds are found at eating establishments at mid-day. Similar changes occur in the mostly-invisible world of electronic communication.
Over 4,000 new students have initiated their UCI network access (“activated their UCInetIDs”) since the beginning of the summer. “Activation” is the process by which students learn what UCInetID they have been assigned, agree to follow UCI’s computer use policy, select private passwords for use with personal UCInetIDs, and receive EA (Educational Access) computing/e-mail accounts. UCI students are very well connected – 95% of UCI undergraduates have active UCInetIDs. In fact, only 40 of the sophomore class of 3,000 students have not activated their IDs.
In the past, the activation process occurred almost entirely at the beginning of the new school year. The process began in June this year, as new students attending summer programs were given the opportunity to activate early. As a result, over half of UCI’s new students activated their IDs before Orientation Week. This is an indication of the growing importance of network services among UCI students.
There are other signs of fall quarter activity – over 175,000 e-mail messages were processed on the student EA systems during the first week of class. Over 300 courses had active EEE Course Mailing Lists, and 1,212 messages had been delivered to subsets of 14,198 student subscribers of those lists.
The EEE (Electronic Educational Environment) Web server had links for 155 course web pages as of October 4th, an all-time high for UCI (establishing a UCI class Web page is at the sole discretion of UCI faculty, unlike other campuses recently in the news). The EEE server fielded 94,343 requests during the first week of class.
There are more visible signs of electronic activity as well, as NACS, Information and Computer Science, Biological Science, Library, E-Link, and other computer labs become very popular places on campus. As electronic activity continues to increase, NACS and campus computing supporters strive to keep up with it. This takes time, money, and patience, all of which are particularly precious commodities as the new school year begins.