Thus far, we have been notified by CIS of each department’s computer usage.

We are waiting for Buildings and Grounds, and the Department Chairs to notify us of #rooms and special equipment per department. We may have to alter our methodology based on what the various departments provide us with.

However, it is important we have computer information, because we can assume they are all the same type of computer, and that will help us when we calculate results, and conclude on our findings.

To Note:

-This data does not include public (for class use) and personal (for professors’ research) labs in any of the departments, particularly the biology, chemistry, physics and astronomy, computer science, mathematics, and psychology departments.  Without access to a number of the labs, it is impossible to estimate how many computers are utilized without being inaccurate and biased to some extent. Therefore, we are only examining the energy used in each academic department’s office. Thus, energy use will correlate with size of department.

-According to the office of computer information services (CIS), each faculty and staff member in a department should have one computer (although some do bring in their own laptops in addition to their office desktop, according to CIS). Therefore, we calculated the number of computers in each academic department through estimating that the number of faculty and staff in a given department equals the number of computers in that department. Because of this, there is certainly a great amount of room for error, as some faculty and staff could use more than one computer (or possibly not use a computer at all, although that is extremely unlikely), some professors work in multiple departments and only utilize one office, and some offices have extra computers for student use. Furthermore, according to CIS the models of the computers vary, but we are unable to take into account which computers require more energy than others, thus we treated all computers equally in terms of energy expenditure. So while our results may not be 100% accurate, we should be able to give a rough estimate of how much energy each department office utilizes.

-We only calculated academic departments; we did not include any academic programs (e.g. Africana Studies, Cognitive Science, Urban Studies etc.). We followed the Vassar College catalogue’s categorization of departments and programs.

-Computers of professors who are on sabbatical were not included in this data, as they are most likely not utilizing their office computers this term.

KEY:

*One very important note for the music and physical education departments: while their numbers seem to be huge, this is misleading. For the music department, faculty and staff include visiting artists and instructors (such as voice teachers and accompanists), and these individuals either share computers or do not have one at all. For the physical education department, faculty and staff include coaches and assistant coaches, who may share computers. Perhaps we shouldn’t include them in this study?

**These language departments share administrative assistants, but just in case one computer has been added to each department.