Problem Solving Is Foremost in UCI Job : Profile: Aide to assistant vice chancellor is part of a smaller staff doing more. Computer skills help.

Doing more with less is the imperative at UC Irvine, which is paring its staff to cope with a budget shortfall.

Few are feeling the pressure more than secretarial workers like Ross Goo, administrative aide to Assistant Vice Chancellor Davida Hopkins-Parham.

“The reorganization has meant more work, but we have fewer people,” said Goo, 29. “Tasks were assigned to certain individuals, but they are no longer here. So I have to go in and without any assistance figure out how they did it before.”

The challenges Goo faces might be as simple as answering other people’s phones or as complicated as doing elaborate data searches.

But Goo said he thrives on the challenges. One of his biggest assets, he says, is computer skills that help him streamline his work.

When an urgent request for information was sent recently to a person who was no longer in the office, Goo said, he was able to find the data in the computer system and transmit it electronically on the spot.

“It was so much easier to do that,” he said. “I like seeing a problem get resolved and knowing that I contributed to it. I want to own my own work and not just be an automaton doing what someone says.”

Being an employee of UCI has a certain irony for Goo, who graduated from the university in 1990 with a degree in film studies.

“As a student here, I’d complain and say, ‘Oh, UCI gave me nothing.’ But now I see that they taught me how to solve problems, how to step back and take a look at the big picture.”

Goo is also breaking gender stereotypes. Friends sometimes tease him about being a male secretary to a female executive, he said, but that doesn’t trouble him.

“Most administrative assistants, male or female, know the answers to things people are calling about and can help them,” he said.

His boss said Goo’s good organizational skills and lively sense of humor help to ensure his success on the job. She, too, hears comments about the gender of her assistant, but takes them in stride.

“A woman wanted to schedule an appointment with me, and I told her to just call Ross and set it up,” Hopkins-Parham said. “She was surprised . . . and said ‘Wow, you have a male!’ ”

* JOB OUTLOOK: D8