The Cal State Fullerton Housing and Residential Engagement office has briefly reopened mailroom assistant student positions after cutting those jobs last spring.
Last April, student employees who worked as office assistants, peer mentors and as facilities student assistants were told that their job positions had been cut, and would not be open for rehiring last semester. In addition, some residential adviser roles were cut.
When informed about the general cuts to student positions, students were told that the department is still working through the logistics for positions such as the mailroom, according to email records from April.
This semester, students noticed that mailroom assistant positions were being offered at a part-time and on-campus job fair hosted by the CSUF Career Center on Sept. 10.
According to Hui-Ling Chan, executive director for Housing and Residential Engagement, the decision to pivot from hiring students for the mailroom to hiring full-time staff to replace certain student positions stemmed from concerns about student interactions with parents, maintaining mailroom efficiency and protecting student information privacy.
“Residential life operations tend to be very complex with a lot of personal information. And so with that, we’re looking at how we best provide the service for our students and the families,” Chan said in reference to the decision to hire full-time staff.
Khalilah Doss, vice president for Student Affairs and Strategic Enrollment Management, added that complaints about efficiency were a key factor in their initial pivot, and that the decision to hire full-time staff would not completely replace all student positions.
“One of the things we really, really try to do, and it doesn’t mean that we’re always going to get it right, it doesn’t mean that we are gonna make everybody happy, but when enough people are saying, three to four weeks for my package is insane, we have to pivot,” Doss said. “And it doesn’t mean our students were doing anything wrong, they weren’t. But for us, we have to look at efficiencies and looking at other ways to pivot, and maybe realign and repurpose.”
Chan stated that after student positions closed on May 31, many students transferred to Summer Conference Student Assistant positions.
Over the summer, campus housing intended to shift to a pick-up locker system for the fall semester, but the ordered locker units were delayed at the Port of Los Angeles for inspection.
After they were notified that there was no set date these lockers would be released from inspection, Chan and the housing office made the decision to reopen student positions in the mailroom for the fall semester.
“Knowing that student positions, once they commit to it, they commit to it (and) it’s a whole semester long. And so we have said, ‘Hey, we want to make this a whole semester long, and we’ll see that we’ll definitely consider that to be a year-long,’ so the students have the position for the year,” Chain said.
According to Chan, 60% of all packages the mailroom sees are Amazon deliveries. Because of the high volume of package deliveries, when these Amazon lockers are full, students are unable to deliver their packages to campus.
Some students, such as first-year kinesiology major Callie Shepard, spoke to the difficulties of navigating the lockers.
“The lockers, they always get full. And so I find myself having to space out when I order certain things, because it won’t fit, because a lot of times, people won’t pick up their stuff,” Shepard said.
The newly purchased lockers operate in a similar manner, where non-Amazon packages, with the exception of United States Postal Service deliveries, could be dropped off in those lockers and the student would be directly notified of the package’s delivery status.
Chan spoke to the delays in packages, observing that deliveries could be stalled for up to four weeks at times, and stated that the “notify me” lockers would create a more efficient pickup system because of their direct pickup and their 24/7 availability.
When logging packages through the mailroom, Chan stated that package delivery was sometimes postponed because of unclearly labeled delivery names, which stalled the process of mailroom assistants notifying students that their package had been delivered.
Chan, who has been assisting mailroom operations, claimed that the mailroom has been able to clear out all packages by the end of their business day; however, some students living in dorms spoke to ongoing concerns with package delays.
“A lot of the packages people complain, it’s like oh they got the tracking, it’s here, it’s delivered but it’s not here. You wait a week, a whole week, which is crazy to think about,”said third-year child adolescent studies major and Jewel Plummer Cobb resident Roland Patzi.
The status of student mailroom jobs will be reassessed after the housing office has evaluated the efficiency of the locker program.