August 2025 CIO Update
As we embark together on another new academic year, VCU Technology Services (VCU TS) continues to collaborate with our partners from around campus to support many facets of campus life by providing critical services to students, faculty, staff, and the extended VCU community. One of the most critical components of this mission is to support the success of our students. I am very happy to share some information on a couple of new services for Fall 2025 that will help to drive student success, but I also want to share one of the highlights of this summer that also demonstrates our commitment to our students.
VCU TS Summer Internship program
This summer, VCU TS offered 5 paid student internships. The internships went from early June to early August (8-10 weeks) and involved working 15-20 hours per week. Each intern was assigned to a full time IT mentor who developed an 8 week internship project plan prior to the start of the internship and dedicated time and effort to mentoring a student. The IT mentor was also responsible for connecting the student with the appropriate system access, data access, staff resources, etc. to accomplish the internship goals. After a kickoff meeting at the Technology Operations Center held on June 2, the interns worked on their assigned projects from June through July, meeting with their IT lead at least once a week to review progress and obtain feedback and support. On August 1, a meeting was held in which the interns provided a final project presentation to their mentors and TS leadership and formally handed off their project work.
I attended both meetings, and I cannot say enough about how impressed I was with the quality of work our interns did as well as their dedication to learning from this opportunity. I am also grateful to the many TS staff who took the time to devote to this program, and I know both the interns and TS greatly benefitted. From one of the interns: “I was shown many resources even outside of VCU for the field I interned in. I appreciate this because it allows me to continue to learn even after the internship is over. Both of my mentors worked with me on areas I wasn’t as familiar with and gave me a good foundation as well.” From another: “My mentor accelerated my learning by guiding root-cause debugging instead of giving answers, setting a high bar in code reviews, and coaching me on communicating impact. He gave me autonomy, which built confidence and ownership.”
We are now working on building and expanding upon this program and will definitely make this a normal part of our operations. And it’s also important to recognize that much of what we accomplish in TS is due to our excellent student employees who work on a daily basis across multiple areas.
New for Fall
I am very excited about new features now built into the VCU Mobile app and launched earlier this month. With the introduction of Day-at-a-glance, one screen that integrates data from multiple sources, students can now see everywhere they need to be and everything they need to do on their mobile device at any time. With many other new great features and integrations with other services, VCU Mobile is a personalized and dynamic mobile hub for students, staff, and faculty, allowing us to better serve the diverse needs and experiences within the population we serve.
Another exciting new application is Career Works. Developed with Student Enrollment Management and Student Success (SEMSS), this application has just gone live and can be used by students and their advisers to manage and track progress on activities and milestones students need to complete in order to successfully navigate their personal career and professional development. This includes tracking job fair and career management event attendance, adviser appointments, student employment and internships, credentials earned, and much more. It integrates with multiple other systems including Handshake and LinkedIn to give students and advisers one place to monitor career management progress and to produce a career management transcript.
These two new applications represent just a small part of the many services and systems that support our students. Just as a reminder, the Campus Technology Guide provides a full listing of services available to students and employees that are supported by VCU TS.
Thanks to all for what has been an amazing start to an exciting new academic year!