Welcome to the community! We’re glad you’re here.
Maybe you’ve been using eRezLife for years as a staff member, and you’ve taken on an elevated role at your institution. Maybe you’re brand new to the team and inherited eRezLife along with everything else in your transition list of to-dos and to-learns. Or maybe someone else decided you’re the person “who’s good at all this tech stuff” and handed you School Administrator access.
However you got here, you now have the master keys to eRezLife. I know, I know — a housing software company making a key joke. Groundbreaking (but we couldn’t pass up the opportunity)!
What It Means to Have the Master Key
Having a master key doesn’t mean you need to open every door in the building (your keys team would probably say that’s unwise from a security standpoint, anyway). It means you’ve been trusted with a level of access that helps you do your job well. Serving as an eRezLife School Administrator is a lot like that.
School Admins have access to the tools that shape how eRezLife works on their campus. Depending on how your campus uses eRezLife, it can mean a few things:
- Managing user groups and permissions
- Creating forms and applications
- Configuring workflows
- Building reports
- Making system changes to support processes
You’re what the software world generally calls a “power user.” We prefer School Administrator or School Admin for short (we’re residence life folks, after all).
Serving as a School Admin doesn’t always mean memorizing the location of every button or knowing every setting in your site. In our experience, some of the best School Admins do two things well: first, they know their institution well and second, they’re curious about how eRezLife can make the day-to-day work easier.
Here’s something we’ve learned from working with hundreds of housing and residence life departments: no two institutions do things exactly the same way. There are some common threads, for sure: we all have students to support, staff to supervise, communities to build, processes to manage, and approximately 847 things happening during move-in.
How your institution accomplishes those things is unique to you. As a School Admin, you get to connect those two worlds.
You know why your RA application asks that particular question. You understand why one group of staff needs access to something while another doesn’t. You know that the process someone described as “easy peasy” actually involves three departments, an approval chain, a spreadsheet someone created in 2017, a three-ring binder in the basement, and an email to Brenda.
Your institutional knowledge matters. The more you understand about eRezLife’s functionality, the more opportunities you’ll imagine to make those processes easier for the team around you.
You Don’t Have to Know Everything
Being a School Admin doesn’t mean you’re expected to know everything about eRezLife. There can be a lot to learn, after all. Your department may use some functions of the system every day, other functions a few times a year, and there may be some aspects you’ve wondered about but haven’t fully explored. That’s okay!
We don’t expect School Admins to be eRezLife encyclopedias. You’ll do your best work in the system if you’re curious and willing to learn.
Great School Admins ask questions. They think about the ins-and-outs of processes and why they work the way they do. They notice when their colleagues do something manually and wonder, “Could we make this easier?” They try things out (on a training site first, we recommend!)
Sometimes the answer is something you can build yourself. It’s as simple as poking around the Help Site, reading a walkthrough article, or watching a virtual training session.
Sometimes it’s more complex and a quick consultation with our support team will help you confirm your theories or consider new pathways. In other cases, a community member has already tackled the same challenge and has a great idea you can adapt to your campus!
You have the master key, but it doesn’t mean you have to open every door on your own (that’s the last key reference, I promise).
There’s another part of being a School Admin that isn’t found under “System Settings.” You’re often the person helping folks at your campus get the most out of eRezLife.
Maybe that means showing a new team member where to find something, simplifying a form that has accumulated too much information over the years, or building a report that saves your team time. You might look at a process that made perfect sense three years ago and realize it doesn’t really fit the way your department works today. With eRezLife, you don’t need to know sophisticated code to make the changes you need. As a School Admin, it’s all at your fingertips in eRezLife so you can make adjustments in real time.
Help Us Make eRezLife Even Better
School Admins also help us make eRezLife even better! It’s helpful for us to hear from you about what’s working and what would take things to the next level. “Here’s what we’re trying to accomplish and why it’s important to our day-to-day” is something we like to hear so we can help you troubleshoot. Your context as a practitioner helps us better understand what today’s professionals need from their software.
One of our favorite things about working in housing and residence life is that practitioners tend to share: resources, successful processes, data that drives decisions, and lessons learned. The School Admin role gives you another community of practice. There are School Admins at institutions of various sizes, structures, and types solving many of the same problems you are. So ask questions, tell us what you’re working on, join us for weekly webinars, attend community events, and let us connect you with other users. You’re not alone and we’re happy to help.
If you’ve recently transitioned into a School Admin role, let us know! Drop us a line at [email protected] and we’ll connect you with resources to help you get comfortable with your new responsibilities in eRezLife.
Learn How Your Institution Is Using eRezLife
It’s also worth spending time to learn how your institution currently uses eRezLife: what processes live in the system? Who uses them? What happens at different points in the year? How does your team handle training of staff?
The training piece is especially important since School Admins play a role in training and supporting the staff using eRezLife on your campus. You’ll likely be the person introducing new staff to eRezLife, training your department on new or existing processes, and helping colleagues feel confident using the system.
If you’re a School Admin leaving your role, let us know you’re moving on so we can connect with your replacement or at least help make that transition a little smoother.
Being a School Admin isn’t just about getting access to more settings. It’s about using eRezLife to simplify your day-to-day work so you have time to focus on what matters most: your students.
You know your campus, students, team, and processes. We know eRezLife. Together, we can find ways to support the work you’re doing and make things easier along the way.
Poke around. Ask questions. Try something new. Reach out whenever you need us.
We’re here to help!
