Letter to a Non-UCF Friend

Dear Jacqueline,

Hey! How's UGA? UCF is great. Well, mostly. We use a system here called MyUCF, which you probably have a form of at UGA actually. It's a pretty neat idea. Everything I care to know, whether it's my grades, what classes I'm taking, degree audit, or even housing, is on this website that I access with a personal i.d. and a password. Cool, right? Well, not so much. It's run by this company called PeopleSoft, and they don't seem to understand the whole don't touch it, if it's good the way it is. I'm always for updates and whatnot, but UCF has basically taken this to a whole new level. Webcourses is located through the MyUCF portal, and that's how most people access it. However, UCF is constantly taking MyUCF offline to "update" it, and tend to work on it on Sundays, which is definitely a no-no when it comes to college students as usually assignments are due Sunday nights and, come on, most people college kids you come into contact with are complete procrastinators (myself included). What really peeves me off though, is that all of these "updates" aren't even helpful! In fact they just complicate the whole system instead. I went from completely understanding how to navigate through it, to only understanding how to access the portal. I'm waiting for them to mess that part up too. I probably wouldn't mind if they gave some sort of instructions on how to use the new updated version, but they aren't even polite enough to do that! I've heard quite a few horror stories about MyUCF's updates. My dad actually has had classes on his degree audit dropped because of these upgrades! That's not cool. And he isn't the first person to tell me about that. That is seriously playing with someone's life right there. Well, anyways, I'll stop venting now. I hope you're doing amazing, and we should totally skype sometime.

See You Soon!

Hilarion

To Expand on the Idea...

MyUCF is a brilliant idea. Make it so the students can find whatever they need to know about their academics on an easy-to-access website. However the actual website that has been derived from that idea is not so great. In fact, it is slowly getting more complicated. Not only are they making it slowly harder to understand, but they are also constantly offline upgrading the system at the most inconvenient times. Obviously, UCF and PeopleSoft haven’t heard of that well-used phrase, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Commentary Ideas

1. Pedestrians abusing the privilege of their right-of-way, especially since most of the time they walk across the street in front of shuttles and cars when there isn't even a cross-walk.

2. How a person can't walk through campus without having at least one political thing thrown in their face. I'm here for an education, not other people's political opinions.

3. How UCF is constantly changing essential school tools, like myucf, and instead of making them easier to use, they make it even harder to understand.