Re: Appointments

[Susan Wolff Murphy <swm5351@unix.tamu.edu>]

Sonja:

At Texas A&M, we have asked for appointments for as long as I've been in
the grad. prog., but I thought I could provide a couple suggestions (based
on field testing).

>The questions:
>1)Do your centers insist upon appointments?  Why or why not?

We have appointment sign-up sheets (by the initials of tutors working each
hour), which people can use in person or call up for an appointment.  We
will sign up students for an appointment right up until the last minute.
We also take walk-ins, given availability.  If an appointment is more than
5 minutes late, and we have a walk-in, the walk-in gets the hour.  We'd
miss a lot of business if we turned away all walk-ins, but appointments
allow for advance planning.

>
>2)Do you mostly have drop ins, or do you balance the two?

I'd say we have more walk-ins at the beginning of the semester, and more
repeat visits by appointment as time goes by.

>
>3)And do you hire someone simply to "person" the desk and control the ebb
>and flow of humanity?

No, each hour one tutor (the one whose initials appear at the bottom of the
list, so they are the least likely to be busy) covers phone & reception.
We rotate the list so all tutors appear at the top sometimes.

>
>4) Hhow do you handle the panicked, the frantic, the upset, the angry, the
>hurried and the harried?
>We end up trying to fit people in because they "didn't know" they needed an
>appointment.

We try to warn people in PR and class visits to make appointments, and that
our center gets busy around deadline time.  I've found that sometimes
trying to fit people in only leads to frustration & may actually damage our
reputation with "responsible" clients.
>
>5)Will people eventually accept this change?  Is this just a growing pain
>or a mounting problem?

?? I don't know.
>
>6)And if we do change to appoinment only, how can we spread the word most
>effectively?

Can you announce it to faculty and/or in the student paper?
>

Good luck.

OH, another note.  We encourage all appointments to start on the hour and
last no more than 45 minutes.  This is flexible, but designed to protect
our consultants.  The extra 15 minutes between clients allows them to enter
records in the computer database and take a short break between
appointments.  Also, we find that if a student can't get thru a paper in
one session, they will often go home and revise before coming back for
another appointment.  (We try to limit them to two appointments per week,
and no more than one a day).