I first heard of IT-FITS from a job-posting flyer taped to a door, and I was hired not long after, in October of my first year at Scripps. Excepting my semester abroad, I’ve worked here every since. My experience with IT-FITS and my experience at Scripps cannot be separated. This semester will be my last, both at Scripps and with IT-FITS, because I’m graduating.
For several reasons, I don’t want to go.
I want to keep taking classes. I want to stay close to my friends, not have everyone scatter across the country where we can’t get together play board games that take up half the floor. I want to stay with IT-FITS, where I have somehow become the most senior and experienced person on staff without really noticing. I want to keep helping professors with their technical gremlins.
I don’t want to acknowledge that this – college and IT-FITS both – is a safety net, not the real world.
All the same, IT-FITS will leave me with a number of gifts. I know that professors do not know everything. I know that some people approach computers as old friends, and that others approach them as hostile alien territory, and how best to help both kinds of people. I know how to use InDesign, Photoshop, and that, desperately clutching an instruction manual, I could put together a perfectly functional Dreamweaver website that from the front end looks great but from the back end appears to be held together entirely by virtual duct tape. I know that if I have a choice, I will cheerfully chuck the Dreamweaver handbook out the window and use WordPress instead.
I appreciate the chance to get to know the IT-FITS team as it has gained and lost members. I love the fact that almost none of us are from technical majors, that nearly everyone has chosen a different foreign language (at one point we had French, Spanish, Chinese, and Japanese, but none of us spoke the same one), that for some reason a disproportionate number of us come from San Diego. It’s utterly hilarious how difficult it is getting all of us and a photographer together to take the group photo every semester.
Even though I don’t want to, I have to leave. But I will step into the real world as a Scrippsie and an ITA.
And I will troubleshoot its computer issues.
By ITA, Hillary Shipps