Executive Summary
The IUPUI Housing and Residence Life Department is interested in boosting their students’ roommate and overall housing satisfaction, as well as finding modern pairing methods and conflict resolution strategies that current and incoming students can use.
This report will benefit IUPUI’s HRL by giving our client and other coordinators recommendations on the best practices pre, during, and post roommate selection process. This also benefits the students who use on-campus housing because they are being paired using the best possible methods of roommate matching and have access to resources that equip them to deal with inevitable conflict during their university years.
The findings in this report are based on a local study conducted by the team of student consultants and online research conducted through academic sources. The local study was produced and the results were gathered using Qualtrics, a survey tool that generates analyses and graphs based on the respondents’ answers. The survey consisted of 10 questions, ranging from roommate conflict, personality tests, and anonymous pairing. The survey was sent out to current IUPUI students.
Online database research was collected using ProQuest Central and Academic Search Premier, leading multidisciplinary research databases whose access is paid for by IUPUI. Another tool used was Google Scholar, a free web search engine that searches for scholarly literature. The information gathered from this research helped shape our recommendations and gave rise to the focus and scope of the local study.
About IUPUI’s Professional Writing Skills Class (W231)
The Writing Program in IUPUI’s English Department created W231 with the goal of partnering with community clients and challenging students to learn pratical problem solving skills through research, analysis, and writing. The class is offered by IUPUI’s School of Liberal Arts. Students in W231 reach out and connect to clients around the community in order to help them tackle a workplace challenge. Students invest ten weeks working with community-client partnerships and compose a unique recommendation report for each client.
W231 COURSE STRUCTURE: INDIVIDUAL and TEAM PROJECTS
W231 Professional Writing Skills includes independent writing projects throughout the semester as well as the ten week team project. Independent writing projects include:
• Connecting and interviewing local professionals
• Composing with a variety of different types of professional writing genres (emails, letters, memos, resumes, personal statements, etc)
The ten-week team project, which is the recommendation report on this website, condenses and summarizes over 200 hours of research, analysis, and writing. The report addresses an in-house challenged identified by a community client.
Some of the community organizations who have worked with the W231 class for the team project includes:
• Indiana NBA Pacers
• Eskenazi Hospital
• Boys and Girls Club
• Creekside Counseling
• IUPUI CAPS
• Luthern Church
• Ronald McDonald House
• Bru Burger
EVERY YEAR W231 Students Dedicate 35,000 Hours to Community Client Projects
Each year over one thousand students form teams then invest ten-weeks to tackle a challenge identified by community-clients. Teams meet with the client one time, then dive into research and analysis as they shape recommendations for the team Recommendation Report.
W231: Professional Writing Skills Sections
• 44 sections (25 sections are face-to-face and 19 are hybrid or online)
• Over 1,000 students enroll each year
Each team is made up of 4-5 students who:
• Partner with over 175 community clients every year
• Create and distribute a local study
• Invest about 200 volunteer hours for each client (100 hours on research and 100 hours on analysis and writing the report)
This means that for between 175 clients, IUPUI students invest at least 35,000 hours to support community partners’ needs.
To learn more about the class W231: Professional Writing Skills visit: https://liberalarts.iupui.edu/english/pages/writing-program-folder/courses.php#rtab5