Santa Clara: The Jesuit university in Silicon Valley?

First off, the new tag and icon for our school bug me a little. But,
not as much as some of the other problems we have here at SCU. I
happen to be an OMIS major and quite a big computer/technology guy.
So while I know that not everyone would think that the things I am
going to point out should matter, I'm going to point them out anyways.
The fact is, they do matter.

Santa Clara is striving to become more well known in the US and the
world as a top ranked Jesuit institution. This can already be seen by
our new library, baseball stadium, plans for the new business school,
and so on. Interest in our school is picking up as well, we had a
greater number or more qualified students apply this year than any
other year. So, things are looking up.

But here's the problem: Santa Clara touts itself as being the Jesuit
university in Silicon Valley, yet you'd never know it if you were just
looking at the school! We still have no campus wide wireless, 100Mb/s
connections throughout campus, an IT department that is ridden with
incompetent people (I however got to deal with one of the few awesome
people there once), and several other annoying aspects.

As Diego has said, campus wide wireless is not difficult at all and
should be a requirement these days. Why we don't have it yet is a
mystery to me. Maybe if we stopped spending boatloads of our $350
million campaign for Santa Clara on an automated retrieval system for
books, we'd have campus wide wireless! Having wireless on the first
floor of Kenna is ridiculous.

The connection speed of our network may seem fast, but it isn't
compared to both other universities and businesses. At Caltech
they've had 1Gb/s connections for a while. Again, this may not seem
like a big deal to a lot of people out there, but it would make a huge
difference. Also, if we had faster connections on campus, this would
allow students to have some network disk space that we desperately
need! We get a lousy 10mb on ANGEL and so little space on Groupwise,
it's embarrassing. Google is adding 4mb of storage per day! For
everyone who is signed up! AFTER adding 1GB on the one year
anniversary! I don't think we have more than 50MB on Groupwise, which
is why I forward everything to my gmail account. My friend at UofM
has all the space he needs for his email. He has never deleted a
message and won't have to. Not to mention the 1GB of general storage
he has access to from anywhere. Hard disk space is so inexpensive,
get a couple Blade switches, and we'd be all set.

I'll come back to IT at a later date, but now on to hardware on
campus: computers. One of the labs in Kenna was a disgrace until this
year. There were 6 year old computers in there, still with CRTs
(those big clunky monitors), all beige and ugly. Finally at the
beginning of this year they were replaced. However, in the commercial
that aired about Santa Clara during the WCC tournament this year, they
still had the old clips of that horrible room! I wanted the
commercial to cut off every time so no one else would see the clip.

So, while those in higher places believe they can pull of this
university as a technology-savvy institution, we all know the truth.
It wouldn't be that hard to fix and bump Santa Clara into that next
tier, but we're not there yet.

I'm sure there are more problems that I've forgotten about...but I'll
remember them soon.