This was my first year working as an STA for tech services, and it’s been an excellent experience as a campus job. As a helpdesk technician, we’re the first line of people to help with tech issues. Over the course of the year, I learned a lot and improved at diagnosing a problem, brainstorming solutions, and knowing who to call when something is out of my league. Obviously there’s still room for improvement on all of those fronts, but I’ll be back next year, ready for more. As a computer science major, solving and identifying problems is an important skill to practice and develop. Even though my job and my coursework cover very different realms of technology, I put effort into understanding the problems present in each one to understand how they can be connected and how to better solve them.

Tech support is our main focus at the helpdesk, but it’s not the only one. We also serve as the point people for loaning out laptops and other tech, print academic posters, and handle the assigning and cataloguing of new devices given to departments and faculty. Sometimes these areas give us larger projects to do, like tagging a bulk order of new devices (This year it was new staff phones) or printing all the posters for the IS symposium. In these cases, we need to build a specific workflow, and I learned how to choose which aspects of it should be streamlined and which were already efficient enough. On most days we run the office as normal, which requires its own workflow. Here, the routines are more established, so trying to figure out what can be changed and improved takes more forethought, but it’s important to still do. I’ve done my best, for example, to clarify the printing instructions so everyone’s on the same page about how to notify people that their posters are ready. These experiences have helped me develop skills in and out of the office that will help me both with my studies and in future work opportunities.