Should excellent customer service be sacrificed to accommodate hectic schedules?

The best solutions to systemic problems are often multilateral. Tapingo, the mobile ordering app recently introduced at the CoHo, the CoHo South Cafe and Biobrew, is no exception, as it manages to ameliorate the experience of the user, the typical customer and the front-of-house employee simultaneously. Not only are these parties eager to ease their lunchtime woes, but the user neither has to wait in line to order nor wait for their food. How does Tapingo accomplish so much? It’s only a tap, after all. The answer is best understood through the sentiments of Darin Schluep, the food service director of Associated Students Dining Services.

“The idea is it not only provides quicker service to those people that are utilizing the app but because they’re not in line ordering the line to order is shorter and the people walking in to order are having a quicker experience as well — that’s the hope,” Schluep said. “The great thing about Tapingo is it alleviates the need to wait in line to order as well as the need to wait for your food to be prepared and then wait in line to pay. Our hope was that as people start to use the app more and more […] then you won’t have people coming in seeing the lines and turning away because they don’t think they’ll be able to wait that long. We do our best to turn the lines over really quickly, but no matter what […] not everybody has the time to wait. So we were hoping to alleviate some of those lines, alleviate some of the crowding in our dining room and hopefully capture more business that way.”

Schluep’s words allude to another feature of Tapingo: delivery. Students on campus, whether in the library or in student housing, can have CoHo treats delivered to a non-CoHo address, increasing access to good food and widening the breadth of business for the CoHo.

Schluep is not the only person who understands the positive potential of Tapingo. ASUCD President Joshua Dalavai is also enthusiastic about the app.

“I’d really like to see more student engagement with it, I think that would be the most important thing for me,” Dalavai said. “I think it would make us all happier.”

While the goals surrounding the app are lofty and aspirational, Levi Menovske, the cafe manager of the CoHo South Cafe and diversity coordinator, identified a way in which Tapingo eliminates an opportunity for excellence in service.

“The CoHo South has always prided itself on its customer service aspect,” Menovske said. “We have really long lines and our way of dealing with that is making sure our customers have a great experience with us, that face-to-face interaction with the cashier, and Tapingo kind of removes that aspect of our customer service and I don’t like that about the app. I think our customer service is what makes us so special and we may we have 1,100 customers that come in every day but 400 of those customers come in everyday because of our customer service. This mobile ordering app is moving away from that interaction where we don’t get to build that relationship with our customers […] but it makes sense for those customers who just want to come in and get out.”

Not only does Tapingo eliminate some of the excellent customer service cultivated at the CoHo South Cafe and other locations, but its introduction was difficult for the front-of-house staff teams either as they had to learn new skills and incorporate them into their pre-existing systems. The app’s employees, who work out of San Francisco, were able to remedy potential initial difficulties by going so far as to meet with CoHo supervisors via Skype. The app team’s diligence should ultimately allow Tapingo to ease the strain of lunchtime rushes for employees in the long run as it more evenly distributes customer flow.

Nerves have settled since the app officially launched on Oct. 23, but the question remains: is it worth it to cut down on wait time to optimize our busy schedules at the expense of the interpersonal customer service that set the CoHo and its satellites apart? More simply, does an app like Tapingo practice empathy for the chaos of our busy lives or does it disgrace the very essence of service itself? Schluep enumerated what motivates him to share the app with his community.

“We know that the students today have more and more demands placed on them,” Schluep said. “I mean our students, we have 400 students working here for the Coffee House and for AS Dining Services and so we’ve seen the demands placed upon them as students at UC Davis go up and up and up. So this is a way for us, although it’s a small thing, to help in some ways. We want to make the experience as quick and painless as possible.”

In addition to being the first UC to incorporate Tapingo into its dining services, Schluep hopes to ultimately share Tapingo with the Dining Commons and the Silo alike. This step toward increased mobile access to campus services is a goal of Dalavai’s as well.

“I think Tapingo aligns with a lot of the recent initiatives that ASUCD is currently trying to undertake especially in the era of increased student growth as we’re seeing people are feeling the squeeze,” Dalavai said. “I think Tapingo does a really good job to alleviate some of that stress if students get behind it and use it.”

Whether or not Tapingo can solve the crisis of astronomically high student population and its escalating growth aside, there’s nothing like a student’s experienced voice to shine a light on the utility of the app at lunchtime.

“The hope is to have all food service entities at UC Davis utilizing the app at some point,” Schluep said. “There is the hope the entire campus will be Tapingo-friendly.”

Written by: Stella Sappington — features@theaggie.org

Women in STEM create nurturing environments, student org support

UC Davis was ranked number one for launching women into science, technology, engineering and mathematics careers and has proven successful in providing a nurturing environment for STEM success. However, just a generation ago, the presence of women in STEM had completely different ratios across the country in higher education, and the progress we see today is the fruit of many magnitudes of effort and the tenacity of some brave women.

LeShelle May, a two-time Computerworld Smithsonian award winner and the wife of Chancellor Gary May, is a pioneer woman of color in STEM who entered the field of information technology at a time when the internet didn’t exist, and neither did many female engineers. She earned a degree in electrical engineering from Boston University and went on to study operations research in graduate school at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Behind her success lies passion, grit and the gumption to navigate a path where she was one of the first.

“Back then it was low-level software,” May said. “It wasn’t the platforms we have now and all the cool stuff. My first job out of graduate school, I was developing some software — just remember […] in 1989 when I got a graduate degree, the internet hadn’t launched yet.”

May was hired at CNN to launch CNN.com, a project she described as “digitizing the newsroom.” She was there to help construct and kickstart their internet. The powerful tool they created is called “media source” — it’s still in production today and won CNN a Technology and Pioneering Emmy Award in 2000.

“When I joined CNN, they hired me knowing I was pregnant, so that’s how much they had invested interest in me,” May said. “In a nutshell, I’m still with CNN and I build web applications. That’s my world — software. I know every language, every platform, every database.”

When May was an undergrad at BU, she didn’t find much diversity in color or gender in the engineering field. In retrospect, she finds that she lacked a group of people to study with and didn’t have the kind of collaborative efforts she observes between students today. She joined the National Society of Black Engineers, but unfortunately her local chapter didn’t have a lot of members. Regardless of these challenges, May loved her field of study and knew she wanted to stay in it.

“As a woman in this field, I was the only developer for a long time,” May said. “Male, period. This gave me confidence that I was one of the first, but as the company grew in the IT area, I’ve come to realize that there weren’t that many women, so I took initiative and started to pair with some universities, [and] we started to hire a lot of [women]. The numbers are higher now. So I changed the landscape there personally, and I think a lot of women are doing that now. They are taking personal initiative to add their own diversity in their own environment.”

Fast forwarding to present-day academia, college campuses across the country have many more resource centers and student organizations aimed at supporting and uplifting women into STEM fields. Here at UC Davis, two students, Ashmita Chakraborty and Anita Gunaseelan began an undergraduate chapter of the American Medical Women’s Association (AMWA), aimed at recruiting and supporting aspiring women physicians, and in turn, providing services to women and children in need. Some of their events include panels with medical students and various doctors to allow students to get a better idea of the medical field and how to navigate it. They also help connect students to mentors and even made a field trip to the UC Davis School of Medicine last spring.

“It’s really nice, because I feel like here [at Davis] I can talk about having a feminine product drive, and people aren’t [disrespectful of] that,” said Gunaseelan, a fourth-year neurobiology, physiology and behavior major. “It’s very accepting here, and I know that somewhere else in the country that might not be the case, so we’re really lucky to be in that kind of environment where it’s not going to be an issue.”

Laila Hassen, a fifth-year civil and environmental engineering major and president of the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) at Davis, described how SWE creates a “SWE-ster hood” that helps the retention of women in STEM and specifically engineering.

“We currently have over 200 members,” Hassen said. “We try to focus on our core values of advancing, inspiring and allowing women to achieve their goals, be that professional, career, academic or even social goals.”

Hassen emphasized the necessity for a support system in order to persevere through tough times in this challenging field.

“I think SWE is probably one of the biggest influences on whether or not a woman stays in engineering in college, or STEM in general,” Hassen said. “If we don’t keep engaging them or help them out and follow up, we can be the difference [between] whether or not they stay in engineering. A lot of our members, including myself, are first-generation Americans, [and\or] first-generation college students, so it’s not like we have a lot of family or prior experience we can rely on. By having SWE, we [gain] that support network.”

Hassen found that there are many setbacks academically and socially when pursuing these rigorous fields, but passion and determination make the four or five years of this study feel shorter.

“There’s always going to be sexism, there’s always going to be racism, there’s going to be all those ‘-isms,’” Hassen said. “But despite that, it’s focusing on what really matters — this inherent belief that as women in engineering we can change the world. As cliche as that might sound, there’s a lot of us that still think it’s true.”

Although there has been much progress since the time when May entered the field in the 1980s, many of the issues from that time persist. Hassen mentioned that she has been in physics classes where out of 150 students, about 10 were female. Although she has had good experiences in her engineering classes, she has faced sexism from a math professor before, and has felt undermined in another STEM class. But she also brought up the fact that much of the time, the inherent bias society harbors is so deeply rooted that people may sound undermining or sexist without even realizing that they do. In these situations, Hassen advises a non-confrontational conversation to elucidate the fact that words hurt, whether intended or not.

Hassen also added that being a woman in STEM may insinuate being part of a specific category or a certain “type of person,” creating a bias in and of itself. As Hassen expressed, a woman shouldn’t have to feel pressured to choose between her “femininity” and what is often perceived as “masculinity.”

“It’s still okay to embrace your femininity if that’s what you are,” Hassen said. “You don’t have to sacrifice one or the other. It’s less about enforcing gender roles or trying to fit a model [and] really just letting people do what they want to do and embrace it. If you want to play with Barbies and dress up and play with Legos — all power to you. Why should we have to be one thing? Why can’t we be everything? Why can’t we be well-rounded?”

Moving forward and uplifting women, however, doesn’t exclude or overlook the involvement of men and their very much necessary contributions in creating a nurturing environment.

“I think we really move forward best when we have everybody on our side,” Hassen said. “We have a T-shirt that says: It’s not a boy’s game, it’s not a girl’s game, it’s everyone’s game.”

Written by: Sahiti Vemula — features@theaggie.org

A look at The California Aggie 40 years ago, alumni experiences in a different world

40 years is a huge gap in time with lots of room for change. In 1977, the world was vastly different than it was in 1937, before World War II, the Civil Rights movement and humans walking on the moon. Today in 2017, with the advent of computers, cell phones and DNA testing, the difference from 1977 could not seem greater.

At UC Davis, the newspaper is one constant part of campus life that has existed for over 100 years. But there are certainly differences between The California Aggie 40 years ago versus today.

“I would type up a story on paper [with a typewriter] and then I would hand that story to one of the composing typists who would retype it into a machine that would spit out a little yellow tape that was about an inch thick,” said Derrick Bang, who graduated in 1977 as an English major with an emphasis in creative writing. “And then you’d run that tape through a machine which would spit out a tape of column-wide strip of your story, and then that would be given to the layout people […] and they would run the strips through a waxer […] so that it would stick when you put it down. One story at a time.”

Bang started writing for The Aggie in the fall of 1974 as a sophomore. He started at UC Davis as pre-vet, but quickly realized that writing was his strong suit. After his stint as a reporter, he transitioned to become the entertainment editor for his junior and senior years.

“We had no way of knowing how long or short the story had to be, so cuts would be made at the last second literally by taking pair of scissors and cutting out two paragraphs in order to get the story to fit with the ads,” Bang said. “That was one of the reasons we were there for so much time because it was a much more time-intensive process. When I wasn’t in class and not doing homework, I was there.”

As entertainment editor, Bang experienced an emerging entertainment scene in Davis. At the time, Davis only had two theaters and couldn’t accommodate the number of movies that were coming out. Nowadays it’s easy to look up movies and reviews at the click of a button, but Bang came up with the innovative idea to run listings of movies that were playing in Sacramento — something none of the other local papers were doing then.

“I knew that people were going to Sacramento [to watch movies],” Bang said. “So every Monday night I would spend two hours calling all of the managers in about 20 different movie theaters and finding out what they were going to be opening that coming Friday, which I would then run in Wednesday’s or Thursday’s paper.”

Today The Aggie runs once a week, but for a long time it was running daily, Monday through Friday. Needless to say, staff members were constantly writing in order to fill the 14 to 16 pages of the daily paper.

“You ended up writing just a lot and it seemed to me that it wasn’t unusual that you would write a story every day, and sometimes more,” said Richard Moreno, a 1978 graduate who majored in political science. “We used to have Associated Press and we were able to plug in wire service stuff to fill some of the holes, but we always tried to make the front page as much as possible local stories in the school or city stories.”

During Moreno’s time with The Aggie, he was at one time or another a reporter, campus editor and city editor. He eventually became managing editor for an entire quarter before becoming ASUCD President. He worked closely with the editor-in-chief at the time, Rob Pattison, and the other staff to run a fun and professional paper.

“I really loved being managing editor,” Moreno said. “We did a lot of projects together, […] and I think that’s part of what I liked, is we were a good team and we liked each other. I remember we did a series called ‘All the Chancellor’s Men,’ which obviously we’re talking about right after the book [‘All the President’s Men’] came out. [It was] a series on each of the vice presidents. It was always fun, there was a good staff of people that we worked with.”

The Aggie ran a few fun and creative projects at the time, including a daily soap opera known as “From the University Chronicles.” Every day ended with a cliffhanger, leaving readers begging for more.

“There was at that time so much freedom,” said Erin McGraw, who graduated in 1979 as an English major with a creative writing emphasis. “I could do anything I wanted to, and I could try anything. If I wanted to write a review in the form of a question and answer series, I could have. Anything would have been a totally reasonable thing to try, as long as I put my back into it and as long as I didn’t make it a joke. That was just super fun, it really was, it was awesome.”

McGraw worked at The Aggie as a writer for the entertainment desk. When she first started, she was assigned to cover a city hall meeting but soon discovered she truly prefered covering dance shows and classical music.

“I really did stay in my narrow little furrow and I was cranking out all of these reviews which were fun for sure and allowed me to see performances and to hear performing arts and all kinds of stuff that I wouldn’t have been able to do on my own,” McGraw said.  “There was wonderful, wonderful classical music that came to Davis. There was a terrific arts scene in Davis in those days, and that was before the Mondavi Center!”

Throughout history, the public’s view of media has come in waves. Moreno said that despite the fact that The Aggie was underappreciated while he worked there, it was still seen in a positive light compared to the public’s opinion of news outlets in 2017.

“In those days there was the Davis Enterprise, and the Woodland Democrat had the Davis Edition […] so I think that was always a challenge to try to get respect and have people look at the paper and consider us serious,” Moreno said. “[Students] don’t get the respect they deserve for the amount of work they put in. Especially in this new era of ‘fake news,’ it’s even harder. We were coming out of a post-Watergate period where there was a little higher opinion of news outlets.”

Despite these waves in attitudes through the years, something Bang, McGraw and Moreno all share is a deep reverence for journalism and journalists themselves. Working at The Aggie helped prepare them beyond college in various writing careers.

“Working at the Aggie prepared me for the 13 years that I was a desk editor at the Davis Enterprise, though one did not immediately follow the other, there’s no question that the experience of one led to the other,” Bang said. “Journalists are fabulous people and nothing distresses me more today than the realization that for about the past 18 months, journalists and journalism in general have been held and are being held in such low regard. I certainly hope that I live long enough to see that trend reversed.”

Written by: Marlys Jeane — features@theaggie.org