Michael Chadwick Named Student Employee of the Year
Junior Michael Chadwick holds his Student Employee of the Year award alongside Manager of Student Employment Maureen Souza and his nominating supervisor, Director of Systems Engineering Steve Athanas.
04/21/2015
By Ed Brennen
Chadwick, a junior majoring in management information systems in the Manning School of Business, has worked in the university’s Information Technology Office since his freshman year, both as a work-study and co-op.
Thanks to his reliability, technical aptitude and upbeat attitude, Chadwick was named Student Employee of the Year at the university’s fourth-annual awards ceremony on April 16 at Alumni Hall.
“A lot of people say IT is just work that goes on behind the curtain,” Chadwick said after receiving the award. “This means all the work I do isn’t going unnoticed.”
The Student Employment and Financial Aid offices hold the award ceremony each April as part of National Student Employment Week. Nominations are open to the more than 900 students taking part in the Federal Work-Study Program, as well as the thousands of others working on a contract basis across campus.
“It’s a great way to say thank you to our students,” said Maureen Souza, manager of student employment. “They’re doing real work in our offices and they’re learning. We would come to a screeching halt without them.”
This year 26 students were nominated by their supervisors for the award. Souza and colleague Lisa Levesque, job location and development coordinator, narrowed the field down to 10 finalists. A panel of judges from a cross-section of campus departments then determined the winner.
Chadwick’s nominating supervisor, Director of Platforms and Systems Engineering Steve Athanas, couldn’t imagine a more deserving winner.
“What separates Mike is he’s always willing to volunteer for roles or tasks that have him working around the clock,” Athanas said. “When we’ve had system outages over the summer, Mike has willingly and cheerfully come in at 3 a.m. to help his team restore operations. He regularly volunteers for 4 a.m. update work and sees his work through to the end.”
Besides building the email server, Athanas said Chadwick was also instrumental in implementing the (http://www.uml.edu/News/stories/2013/vLabs.aspx) vLabs project, which allows students, faculty and staff to remotely access software that would normally only be in computer labs found on-campus.
“Mike has been integral in that project and the next generation of it that we’re baking right now,” Athanas said. “And when I say he’s been integral, I don’t mean he’s been occasionally testing it. He is literally designing and building it every day. … He’s got engineering fingerprints all over it, which I think is unique for a student employee.”
Chadwick, a commuter from Pelham, N.H., says working 15-18 hours a week in the IT office (and full-time during breaks) has given him a leg up on his career aspirations.
“I always get to work with the latest and greatest software that I specialize in, and I get to use very fast and very high-end equipment, which is nice,” said Chadwick, who is also captain of the men’s club lacrosse team. “Doing all my engineering here, I have that on my resume. I can go out and take maybe a tier 3 support job,” which handles expert-level troubleshooting and analysis methods.
Other nominees this year were Marynawal Abdou; Tanezsha Bostic-Woodley; Joshua Cannon; Katherine Castro; Michael Duchesne; Molly Galvin; Sarah Gulcius LaGoy; Melissa Iorio; Chrisna Khuon; Megan Lulsdorf; Lauren Michaels; Carol Nguyen; Jenna Nickerson; Jonathan Oljey; Hunter Poulos; Jessica Price; Thomas Reimonn; Jaymes Riley; Juan Rodriguez-Santana; Matthew Szekely; Lindsey Viera; William Wallace; Bobby Yassini; Kyle Yost; and Fang Zhang.