The UCSF School of Medicine has partnered with the UCSF Library to provide help-desk services to medical students through the Library's Interactive Learning Centers.

The following services are available from the ILC and ILC-South 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. Monday - Friday (excluding holidays and breaks).

• Consulting services are provided in ILC-South (S165). Medical students can make consulting appointments with help-desk staff. Students must bring their UCSF photo ID to the consultation. You can make and appointment by:
  • Online Consultation Request
  • Voice-mail, 502-5329
  • Walk-in signup in S-166.
  • Other UCSF students will be assisted on a drop-in basis only.
• ILC staff will provide application support for the MS Office Suite, Web browsers and plug-ins, e-mail, and desktop operating systems.
• Assistance will be provided with network connectivity, including troubleshooting and configuring laptops for VPN and wireless network access.
• ILC staff will assist students in referring calls to ITS for matters such as problems with UCSF e-mail accounts and changing UCSF Email or VPN passwords.
• The ILC consulting service will troubleshoot student laptops by checking for proper device configuration and installation. The ILC will not replace or repair hardware, and will not provide any licensed software.

See also this page on protecting your computer from viruses, worms, and other harmful software.

ITS Customer Support provides assistance with your UCSF e-mail account and VPN account.

The ITS Customer Support unit is staffed Monday - Friday, 7:00 am - 6:00 pm and can be reached at (415) 514-4100, option 2, or by e-mail at itscs@its.ucsf.edu. They do not have a walk-in facility.

UCSF E-mail

UCSF issues all medical students an e-mail address and students are expected to access the account throughout their enrollment in medical school. ITS provides some information on getting started with your UCSF Student Email account. See the SOM E-mail policy for details.

Storage: 100 MB limit on all folders inclduing: Inbox, Deleted Items, Sent Mail, Saved Mail, Calendar, Personal Contacts , etc. At around 91 MB you will beging to receive warning notices that you are apporaching your storage limit. At 100 MB you will not be able to send mail until you delete messages and your mailbox is under 100 MB.

Off-campus Network Access

A VPN (Virtual Private Network) account, in combination with access to the Internet via your own Internet Service Provider (ISP), provides secure access to the UCSF internal network. Access to the UCSF internal network gives you access to resources restricted to verified UCSF users. This includes Library resources such as licensed textbooks and full-text journal articles. All medical students have been provided with a VPN Account.

VPN Username and Password

Your VPN username and password is the same as your SAA user id and password.

NOTE: If you entered medical school before September 2001 please contact ITS Customer Service for to obtain your VPN username and password at (415) 514-4100, option 2.

How to use the VPN@UCSF service

For students who only need to access web-based resources we recommend the SSL VPN system. The SSL VPN system is a web-based proxy, that allow you access to resources on the UCSF computing network.

To use the web-based VPN:

1. Verify that you are running a current version of Java. The SSL VPN system utilizes Java to connect you to the UCSF computing network, the minimum version of Java supported by the system is Sun Java v1.4.1 or Sun Java 1.4.2 depending on your operating system, you can find out what version of java you have on your system at the VPN Test Page.
2. If you find you that your install is not up-to-date, please see the instructions on how to update Java found on the Test Page .
3. Connecting to the vpn@UCSF SSL service is easy; just go to the following URL and login using your SAA User ID and PIN. https://vpn.ucsf.edu
4. You can access a Quick Start Guide  for more instructions.

Medical Student Lounge

The Medical Student Lounge (Medical Sciences S-245) has three computers for medical student use. These are Windows-based computers with a printer that utilizes the Library's Printing Service (LPS).