Texas-Sized Support

Help Desk Support at Texas A&M University

Mike Gerst, Information Technologist, Texas A&M University:
Thank you Nathan. Howdy from Texas to all of ya'll. This is Mike Gerst. I provide enterprise level support to the Agricultural program at Texas A&M University. My predominate people that I support are the IT faculty and staff that supports the actual teachers and students at A&M. The agricultural program is part of the Texas A&M University system. We're obviously not all that; there are engineering departments and there's math and sciences and health. And, we are customers of the Texas A&M University system LAN and Wide Area Network and we use the internet infrastructure to connect both on campus and to our off-campus clientele.

As a result, we control very little of the network infrastructure, especially at our county offices. And, we don't regularly handle student workstations except as they are employees of the agricultural program. Let me give you a picture of the A&M campus. This is one of several campuses. The main thing that I want you to get out of this campus is that the A&M campus is spread over a wide area. You're looking at about four square miles of area here. The main campus is at College Station. That's where I am at. And, even the regional airport, which you can see in the lower left hand corner of the picture, is part of our campus and serves the whole community here.

We have a number of offices that are in rented spaces that are off campus that are in the local cities. And, as you might guess, we do not have an IT staff member, IT support staff member, in every department or on every building on campus. There are many other A&M campuses across the state and remote access for our IT support people can mean across this campus, across other campuses, between campuses, and across the state to each of 256 counties.