A student employee committee recognized Nathaniel Price, one of the Computer Science Department's student webmasters, as the university's student employee of the year.
Out of the 13,000 students employed by the university, over 100 were nominated. Nathaniel was selected from among those nominees to be recognized for his service to the university and the Computer Science Department.
A senior in computer science, Nathaniel is from Oregon City, Oregon. In the three years that he has worked for the department, he has gone above and beyond the average student employee in his contributions.
One of Nathaniel's contributions has been to streamline the hiring process for students in the department. Nathaniel created a program in which professors can go online to request students who have applied for RA and TA positions. The requests are then sent to the department office and from there to the university employment office, allowing the entire hiring process to be paperless and online.
Gene Larson, operations and systems manager for the computer science department, said how much easier life is with this new program.
"Students can apply and faculty can go through the selection process online," Larson said. "We used to have full-time employees keeping track of these student employees. Nathaniel's system now takes care of all this."
Office manager Gordon Billings was also impressed with Price's adaption to situations.
"He's very adept at taking requests from technical and non-technical people and deciphering what they want and need," Billings said.
More recently, Nathaniel upgraded the department's website to a Drupal system in which multiple users can take ownership over different parts of the website, managing and updating it themselves.