Help Center
Employee Onboarding Checklist
Arrival checklist
- Attend university orientation on arrival.
- Present yourself to a COSMOS orientation (Contact Ahmed Al Taweel, asaltaweel@ualr.edu).
- Once you are eligible to register for classes – Maintain student status by registering for classes. International services, graduate school, and program coordinators are the best contacts for this. Make sure to enroll for Dr. Agarwal’s IFSC 5360 Social Computing course (offered in the Fall) and IFSC 7399 Research Methods course (offered in the Spring).
- Submit material (desktops, monitors, etc.) needs to your team lead.
- Request a Virtual Machine for GA duties (Contact your team lead).
- It is recommended to setup the UALR VPN on your own machine to access your work remotely. To request VPN access, send an email to ITS (itservices-help@ualr.edu) and copy Dr. Agarwal (nxagarwal@ualr.edu) for approval.
- Apply for a social security number (SSN). The Office of International Student Services (OISS) provides detailed instructions here. Your GA offer letter will be required.
- Get familiar with GA benefits such as paid time off or PTO policy.
- Work Schedule. Complete the work schedule form and post it in the designated area of the lab. Mention the times you will be away (e.g., classes, lunch, break). Mention your incoming and outgoing time. For full GAs, you should be in the lab for at least 20 hours. The more time you spend in the lab with your team members, the more you will benefit from in-person interactions.
- Get lab access (Contact Fadime Ledford, faledford@ualr.edu).
Permissions
All GAs will be added to the below services.
- COSMOS workspace on Slack
- COSMOS workspace on ClickUp
- COSMOS github account
- COSMOS meetings on Google Calendar – held in person
- Shared COSMOS drive on Google
- COSMOS mailing List
- Training material drive
Teams (contact leads for more details)
- Bias – Mert
- Blogtracker – Abiola
- Churn Analysis – Ahmed
- Connective Action – Billy/Shaik
- Data Object – Manohar
- Focal Structure – Mustafa
- Indo-Pacific Project- Mustafa
- Knowledge Graph – Abiola
- Narrative Analysis – Mayor Inna
- Outreach – Tenzing
- Toxicity – Niloofar
- VTracker – Shadi
- Video Characterization – Dr. Agarwal
Accommodations
Accommodations are a GA’s responsibility and they should make sure it is taken care of beforehand. Most people pick one of two options:
- UALR provides some housing options where you will be assigned one or three roommates. You can apply here and get more details here. Of course the more expensive they are the nicer the apartments. For example, only the units in University Village have individual bathrooms. They are actually quite expensive so this may be a good option for your first semester until you are able to find people to room with outside of campus. These apartments are on-campus so there will be no need to worry about driving.
- You can get your own apartment anywhere in town. Almost every person in COSMOS currently stays at Westpark Meadows (you can check out here or here). This may be a good option once you have found one or more people you would like to room with but do note you will also need a car or to make arrangements with someone who does.