Kudos to the Student Technology Collaborative team

As one of Yale’s most unique academic years draws to a close, our sincere appreciation goes to the Student Technology Collaborative (STC) team, who overcame significant hurdles this year—starting with shifting from traditional on-campus support to fully remote STC training, collaborative work sessions, committee meetings, and events. Working together with the STC management team, support transitioned from fully on-campus to remote with limited essential in-person interactions—all while sustaining the rigorous academic achievement needed to earn a degree at Yale! 

Instrumental to the success of Yale’s student body, the STC team swiftly adapted to COVID protocols and guidelines to provide uninterrupted technology support and resources to the student community. 

A few highlights include:

• Successfully transitioned hosting STC orientation for incoming students to a virtual environment.
• Provided technology advice, diagnosis, and troubleshooting through online chat.
• Developed digital self-help guides. 
• COVIDSwiper (also known as CardSwiper), developed and maintained by STC developers, was adopted by Yale as a crucial component supporting Yale’s COVID-19 testing response.
• Increased number of loaner laptops available and provided specialized delivery service during quarantine periods. 
• Provided in-the-moment support to individuals hosting live Zoom events.
• Digital media equipment borrowing changed to a locker system checkout and schedule, which included a quarantine period. 
• Cluster techs made their rounds on campus disinfecting and maintaining printers.
• Student developers successfully continued their work on projects without interruption, creating a tool used for student work schedules and a ride-sharing app.

A few words to our STC graduates

Thank you for your hard work, dedication, and agility. This year’s extraordinary circumstances and obstacles have no doubt changed your daily lives. Each of you is encouraged to take a purposeful pause to reflect on how you navigated and conquered such unprecedented challenges and be proud! 

Our sincere appreciation goes out to Beamlak Ashenafi, Jaylen Bailey, Grace Bartlett, Josh Beasley, Ryley Constable, Tommy Johnson, JP Kenney, Sam Maniscalco, Mohamed Mohamud, Frederic Nicholas, Toby Richkind, Shaima Shama, Vera Villanueva, and Bradley Yam. 

A few thoughts, reflections, and advice from STC seniors:

As a result of working in STC, I developed more interest in computers, data science, and later machine learning, which has motivated my future career ambitions and interest in data protection and analytics.

You can be assertive in any role in STC, I was able to gain the essential life skills of effective communication, problem solving, how to focus on important time sensitive issues, leadership and teamwork.Do your best to learn everything you can.

There are many really smart people in STC, and if you hang around, you’ll learn a lot of interesting things from them, tech-related or otherwise.

I enjoyed helping first-year students set up their computers with the litany of software Yale uses and give out free STC swag!

I found myself writing more clearly and in a way that any reader could understand steps needed to repair a computer.