When you look to make a major investment, you want to work with someone familiar with both the product and your needs. When you require support, you want to speak with someone who understands. That’s Terra Dotta!

The Terra Dotta team represents not only those skilled in software development and support, but we include many with significant experience working in higher education. International education to be more precise. Our experience with international student and scholar services, SEVIS, education abroad, and risk management come from years of service at more than 20 universities and study abroad organizations.

So when your international data management needs call for experienced providers, think Terra Dotta. We speak your language.

Kerry Geffert
Product Evangelist, Terra Dotta

Last month I had the opportunity to attend my first URMIA Conference. URMIA stands for University Risk Management & Insurance Association. It was fascinating to learn about the broad risk implications that exist within an educational institution’s day-to-day life. Some we expect, such as laboratories and sporting events. Others were new to me, such as drones and floor slipperiness. But what were particularly intriguing were some of the topics related to our world of education abroad.

At the conference were the standard topics on health and safety in education abroad. These informative and valuable sessions provided our perspective for those responsible for an array of risk matters on a campus. Risk managers need to have an understanding of physical and mental health concerns students may face on study abroad. They typically are familiar with safety matters, but may not yet have an appreciation for the variety of cultural settings in which students will find themselves. It is important that we continue to provide this information to our colleagues. By joining forces through collaboration we advance our field; however, more importantly, we advance opportunities for our students to participate in safer, more fulfilling programs abroad.

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Noah Kriger is a Client Support Specialist who started with Terra Dotta in September of 2015. He manages support cases, assists with client ISSS site implementations and administrations, and collaborates with the Terra Dotta product development team to design and test enhancements to the ISSS functionality within the software. Prior to joining Terra Dotta, Noah was a DSO/ARO for 15 years at the International Student and Scholar Services offices at both North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Noah graduated from North Carolina State University in 2005 with a Bachelors of Arts in Communications with a concentration in Public Relations and minor in History and International Studies.

Outside of work, Noah enjoys spending time with his wife, daughter, dog, and cat. They love going out in the boat, heading to the beach, or just playing in their kiddie pool in the backyard. A vacation spot Noah says he would love to visit is Machu Picchu in Peru.

Noah says his favorite part of working at Terra Dotta is “I love the collaboration with clients. Each client institution has such unique and interesting perspectives and business practices. It is a joy to work with each client to determine what exactly those needs are and to find new ways for the software to meet each need.”

Explore the application inside and out from the perspective of an admin and the applicant. In this session, attendees will learn about the elements making up the building blocks of the application. These include, however are not limited to: materials, signature documents, questionnaires, etc.

OCTOBER 19 11:00 AM EDT

Most ISSS office application processes force students into navigating and managing several different communication channels with various campus stakeholders. For offices that use paper-based applications, that can translate to the student walking materials to every corner of the campus. If only there was a portal the student could use to streamline this process and simplify the submission of applications to the ISSS office, oh wait, there is, Terra Dotta! This session will focus on the student experience of applying for CPT using TDS. By seeing your application processes through the eyes of your student, you will have a better understanding of TDS, not to mention the ability to increase students' satisfaction with interacting with your office.

NOVEMBER 2 4:00 PM EST

Ever get the feeling that you are floundering in applications, and if you could somehow organize them, you would be better able to deal with them? Sally will first demo how to create a query and how to detect changes in your query's search results through the application of a query watch. The query watch can then react to these changes in a number of different ways to inform and automate some of your processes. Dan will then follow-up with examples of how he uses queries and query watches to accomplish certain things in his office.

NOVEMBER 16 4:00 PM EDT

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