Launch of Talos Creates Difficulties for the Stuyvesant Community

Stuyvesant launched a new student information center called Talos last June. A system designed to facilitate communication between students and parents within the Stuyvesant community, Talos allows students to view information such as their locker numbers and combinations, their schedules, and their pending textbook returns all on one interface. Students can also request classes for the upcoming semester and submit requests for online program changes. The latter proved to be critical as the 2018-2019 school year began.

Talos was created to “make school processes more efficient and [ensure] that students […] do what they want to do and administrators do what they want to do,” Rodda John (‘17), creator of Talos, said. “The idea is [to] let the students give the information to students. Let them make the change that they want to make.” Though the site initially facilitated online Advanced Placement course selections, its role in regulating program changes in general quickly grew.

Students were informed of the use of Talos for program changes just as the school year began. Soon after, students began making online program requests and receiving queue numbers for in-person schedule changes. Talos attempted to make program changes as fair as possible by prioritizing students based on their program change number, rather than how fast they arrived at the site of program changes.

The system tried to be convenient for both faculty and students. The process of creating the site took “a lot of student input,” John said. “I get e-mails from faculty almost every day.”

The site allowed students to view the number of available seats in the classes they desired to transfer into and enabled guidance counselors to approve online requests prior to in-person program changes. These implementations were meant to decrease the number of students at in-person program changes and help alleviate the pressure placed on the guidance counselors. “We were able to make three hundred more program changes in one day than we made over the entire period last year,” John said.

However, the integration of Talos at Stuyvesant caused many unforeseen setbacks. Some students vocalized their concerns and frustrations with the system. “I used it for program changes during my junior year, and it really did not go well at all,” junior Alison Juray said. “I requested a program change and it was really slow [...] because a lot of people were on Talos [...] at that time.”

Additionally, many students who did not get their changes approved online had to go to in-person program changes during the first week of school in order to fix issues they had. They also faced issues with Talos, specifically with their assigned numbers for in-person program changes. Students noticed fluctuations in their numbers, as well as difficulty in obtaining them in the first place. “I requested three or four program changes, but I couldn’t find my number,” Juray said. “By the time my friend asked me, ‘Hey, what number are you,’ I [was] five hundred-something.”

In-person program changes were congested with students who needed to resolve issues. “They were going through the one-hundreds when I got there,” Juray said. As a result, many students left without even addressing their program changes. “I went home,” Juray said. “It was a super stressful experience.”

Despite the issues faced by some students, others had more pleasant experiences. “I was planning on going, but my change got resolved before,” sophomore Anne Rhee said.

Sophomore Emily Chervinsky agreed. “My experience during program changes was very pleasant. It ran very smoothly. It was not like last year when all the students were crowded into lines for each subject,” she said.

Assistant Principal of Pupil Personnel Services Casey Pedrick explained that the biggest issue during program changes was the amount of people connected to the Wifi server. “Floors one through five were all on the same line. [...] The entire counseling suite, the program office, then in the cafeteria where we set up [...] were all pooled on the same line, plus all of you guys who were refreshing Talos all the time,” Pedrick said. “Volume and capacity on the server [were] probably our biggest issue[s].”

Guidance counselors also faced struggles with handling program changes in the best way possible. “Other students were doing more complicated asks. So when you open up the file, it would literally be eight inches of text, of drop this, add this, drop this, add this. It wasn’t even as neat as I’m relaying it,” Pedrick said. “At the end, you could only say yes or no to that whole request.”

However, despite these issues, Pedrick is hopeful for the future use of Talos, especially because it is suited to the specific needs of Stuyvesant. “It’s very user-friendly and very intuitive,” she said. John also expressed his hope for the future of Talos. Though the system did have its setbacks, “It did work better, I think, than the previous system,” he said.