By Sophie Lange, Assistant News Editor
Gettysburg College’s IT Department, housed in the West Building, provides a wide variety of services to undergraduate students, graduate students, faculty and staff. G-Tech is likely the most well-known and utilized of these College services with over 1,500 tickets in their system from the Fall 2023 semester alone.
Run by Computer Support Specialist and Student Coordinator for Infrastructure and Computing Kevin Cheng, G-Tech employs four student workers who offer technology solutions to students who have issues with device registration, Wi-Fi connectivity, password resets and multi-factor authentication.
Andrea Lopez ’25, who has worked at G-Tech since she was a first-year, detailed her experience, saying, “Even though I work at G-Tech, I don’t really know everything, obviously. Students expect us to know everything, and it’s not easy, but I’m just doing my best… Sometimes, if I don’t know the issue, I can always go to the other IT staff around the West Building… I really like this [working at G-Tech] because I feel like every day, I learn something new.”
Cheng, with assistance from the student workers, created and published the Gettysburg College IT Knowledge Base. This serves as a resource for students, faculty and staff, and it provides answers to frequently asked questions. Both Cheng and Director of Infrastructure and Computing Thomas Franza agreed that the Knowledge Base is the most important resource for students. According to Cheng, the Knowledge Base had been viewed by students nearly 25,000 times.
Student Assistant for G-Tech Norell Paluska ’26 commented that the Knowledge Base “has so much information that is helpful to students from connecting a computer to WI-FI or registering a gaming device. It is helpful to redirect students to that website because it has detailed information on the common issues that arise with students.”
Beyond helping individuals with technical issues, the IT Department also works to ensure that the college’s Wi-Fi is accessible across campus, including in residential halls, academic buildings and outdoor spaces. Franza and Cheng explained that the issues that students experience with Wi-Fi can have a number of causes, including but not limited to those that stem from individual device configurations, bandwidth issues and cyberattacks.
“Sometimes, I think we [IT and students] are not on the same page as far as when people say they have a problem with the Wi-Fi, and then, we look at data logs,” Franza said. “It’s like trying to find out where that common ground is, if that makes sense because in some cases, I’ve had it where students have said there’s a problem with the Wi-Fi, and then, they say they can’t make cell phone calls. That’s not really the Wi-Fi; that’s the cell phone provider. We don’t really have too much control over that.”
Additionally, Franza explained that the scale of the campus’s Wi-Fi is much different than what would be found in a typical household because of the number of people who use it daily, especially when considering the fact that most students have multiple devices on the Wi-Fi at the same time. He also expressed that IT intended to meet with the Student Senate to discuss the possibility of starting a new committee on technology within the Senate. This would open more channels of communication between students and IT as a way to make the most of limited resources.
Franza explained that students should contact IT via email or phone as soon as possible after they start having problems with technology.
Cheng agreed, wanting students to bring forth issues as soon as possible: “…some students just started reaching out to G-Tech starting this last Friday about their Wi-Fi issues. Some of these students never reached out before. We keep records of everything, and I have no record of them ever reaching out before, so that’s fantastic.”
This article originally appeared on page 16 of the December 2023 edition of The Gettysburgian’s magazine.
