Personal Assistant Manager: Documentation

After saving the information on your enrollment period, PAM will automatically direct you to the following screen to load your registrar’s file of students who meet your chapter’s membership eligibility requirements. If you not able to obtain an electronic file of eligible students from your registrar, refer to the section entitled “Add Eligible Student” for directions on how to submit eligible students to Headquarters. The registrar’s file should be a text file, containing rows of data for each eligible student. The data should be in the same order for each student with a comma between each field of data. An example of a data file is shown below.

first name,middle name,last name,address,city,state,zip,phone,email,major,graduation date Lea,Ann,Bethany,1010 PTK Road, Jackson, MS, 12345, (601)555-3558,LeaAnn.Bethany@ptk.org,MATH,5/17/2007 Virginia,,Bethany,1010 PTK Road,Jackson,MS,12345,,Gracie.Bethany@hotmail.com,unknown,5/17/2008 Note: in the second row of this file excerpt, Virginia Bethany’s middle name is missing and phone number is missing, however a ,, demotes the field is empty. Also the row lengths are not the same, however the # of commas in each row are the same and the data is in the same order with ,, denoting empty data positions.

1. Press the Browse button and select the Upload File to upload its contents into PAM.
2. After clicking the Upload File button, PAM will read the file selected and allow you to preview the data in the file. A screen similar to the following will appear:

Screen Preview:

Number of records: The total number of records in the file should be indicated as shown above. Only the first six records and the last five records in the file will be reflected on the screen. Columns: The data should appear in noticeable columns as in the preview above. If the preview does not show data in several different columns, the correct type of file has not been loaded. Student: Each student should appear on a separate line as shown above. If not illustrated as above, the file is not formatted correctly. Title Row: If the file contains a title row, it should appear as the first row, with the first student’s information indicated in the second row.

   3.  Select the Load Data button

1. If in Step 1: Opening Your Enrollment Period you selected the option for students to either complete a membership application online and submit fees online, or simply complete their membership application online, as PAM loads the data for each eligible student, a unique Passcode is generated for each eligible student. This Passcode is the code the student will enter to login to the membership application process online located at http://www.ptk.org/acceptmembership/.

Errors: After selecting the Load Data button, data will be validated against various lists such as states and major codes. If PAM finds data that does not match the data in the lists, it will display a screen similar to the following one, asking for a corrected translation.

1. In the screen listed below, PAM does not recognize “Ms” as a valid state code.
   
2. Select the drop down arrow and select “Mississippi” from the state list.
   
3. Select the Submit Fixes button. PAM will learn that “Ms” in state column of the data file means “Mississippi” and will not repeatedly ask for this translation for each row of “Ms” in the data file.
   

Note: College major codes not on the standard Phi Theta Kappa major code listing will be handled in the same manner.