A team of student workers at the Terry College of Business received the top group honor in the annual Student Employee of the Year awards program, co-sponsored by the University of Georgia Career Center.
Allison Doss, Jack Dugan, Samir Gupta, Natalie Roberts, Chandler Shockley and Lawson Smith won the Student Employee of the Year Team Award for their work in Terry’s Office of Information Technology, where they performed a crucial role helping the college transition to remote learning during the early days of COVID-19.
OIT Solutions Center Manager William Foglesong said the student employees helped Terry stay afloat during a hectic time by handling the bulk of service requests, freeing full-time staff to focus on supporting the college’s pandemic response.
“Our student team shouldered the burden of ensuring the college’s technology remained operational while our Tier 2 team and upper management scrambled to respond to COVID-19,” Foglesong said.
During that period, the student workers helped faculty implement remote-teaching technology, responded to help desk calls from faculty and staff and fulfilled work-from-home equipment requests, among other duties.
In addition to supporting daily operations as the college went fully virtual, the student team took on the significant task of captioning hundreds of hours of instructional videos for Terry faculty, as required by the UGA Disability Resource Center.
“Students worked directly with faculty while under immense pressure to meet critical deadlines of release, to learn terminology appropriate to those courses and to understand and interpret many forms of language barriers,” Foglesong said.
The students’ impact didn’t stop there. Informed and inspired by the challenges Terry faced in early 2020, the group proposed a new initiative for the fall that would allow student workers to train faculty and staff on a range of current technologies.
“Essentially, we realized that faculty and staff needed a quick way to adapt to rapid changes such as COVID,” said Gupta, a senior computer science major from Johns Creek.
The resulting program, Terry Tech Tutors, earned an enthusiastic thumbs up from the department and is slated to launch this fall as a collegewide resource.
“This project is aimed at reducing the amount of ‘teachable tickets’ we receive by giving one-on-one training to faculty and staff in all sorts of instructional technology,” said Dugan, a senior cognitive science major from Conyers. “We hope to give our faculty and staff confidence in their own technological aptitude.”
Foglesong said the students’ tutorials are leaving a lasting mark on the Terry College.
“Terry Tech Tutors is a legacy that this group of talented students is setting up and leaving behind for the next wave of students that take their place,” Foglesong said. “They have set up a service that will enhance our faculty and staff’s abilities, as well as our students’ learning experience.”
For Dugan and Gupta, the unprecedented circumstances for tech support during the pandemic made the Career Center honor all the more memorable.
Dugan, who begins graduate studies in public health at UGA this fall, said the past year’s turbulence actually brought the team closer together, helping them to thrive.
“The culture of teamwork is something that I’m tremendously grateful for,” he said, “and I can proudly say that every member of our team is a genuine friend of mine.”
Gupta, who starts work full-time as a technical analyst in August, said his unique experience helping a major university quickly pivot to alternate ways to work prepared him for curveballs that may come in his career.
“I’ve gotten the chance to meet and interact with incredible people across all of Terry,” said Gupta. “I’ve had some problems that were head-scratchers, but thankfully we were able to solve them.”
Co-sponsored by the Career Center and Division of Student Affairs, the Student Employee of the Year awards honor as many as 100 individual student workers across the UGA campus, in addition to the top team prize.
The 2021 awards ceremony coincided with National Student Employment Week, which recognizes students who work while attending college.