Tag Archives: 2013

Get the Scoop on Internships with the Peer Internship Network

TechNews,

As part of the yearly Founder’s Day celebration, students are asked to participate in an essay contest that proposes a project that aims to improve the Simmons experience. Last year’s winner, Marie Ledger ’12, advanced the idea of an internship database that would provide prospective interns at Simmons with feedback on internship experiences from other students and create a way for current students and alumnae/i to network.

After President Drinan selected Marie’s essay, the Career Education Center (CEC) started work on planning and implementing the database. Once the CEC had proposed building the database into CareerLink, they partnered with Technology to identify a vendor to configure the database and to begin work on a rollout and communication strategy.

As of January 2013, the Peer Internship Network is set up and the team is gathering internship feedback from students and alumnae/i to populate it. The database will contain information about the student who submitted the internship listing, basic information about the employer, whether the internship is for-credit and/or paid, and a description and rating of the experience. If you have past internship experience and you’d like to contribute, please log in to CareerLink and see the information at the top of the screen.

Once the Peer Internship Network is officially unveiled, we’ll be spreading the word on campus and online. Keep an eye on Simmons Connection for more information.

Tips for Better YouTube Video Streaming

TechNews, , , ,

As the number of educational and informational videos on YouTube has grown, it has become an important source of streaming video content in classrooms and meetings. Because so many people are uploading and/or viewing content on YouTube at any given time, this can lead to occasional lags when videos are loading. Unfortunately, there is little that Simmons can do to rectify this issue. The lag is caused not by our servers or the Internet connection at Simmons but by the volume of bandwidth available at YouTube.

If we think of a flow of information like water, bandwidth represents the size of the pipe that the water flows through. Depending on the availability of bandwidth, a YouTube video can fluctuate in quality or pause while additional content loads. YouTube is working to make their video player more efficient and to present videos that will automatically adjust in quality based on available bandwidth, but neither of these tactics represents a complete solution to the lag in loading times.

There are a couple of things you can do to help alleviate slow loading times for videos. First, if you’re loading a long video but only want to show a select portion of it, you can create and share a link or embed the video on a website with a specified start time by following the instructions here. If a video is slow to load, you may also want to refresh the page or clear your web browser’s cache. You can find instructions on how to do that here. If you’ve tried these solutions and you find that video lag is still a persistent problem, please contact the Service Desk at 617-521-2222.