The senior student webmaster in the BYU Computer Science Department, Nathaniel was recognized as Brigham Young University's Student Employee of the Year in April.  The Western Association of Student Employment Administrators now announced that Nathaniel is the top student employee for the state of Utah as well.  In awarding the honor, WASEA considered Nathaniel's reliability, initiative, uniqueness of contribution, quality of work, professionalism, and community and campus service.

His supervisor, Gordon Billings, says, "[Nathaniel is] very adept at taking requests from technical and non-technical people and deciphering what they want and need."  

On campus, Nathaniel, who is a computer science major, developed and launched a streamlined 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, former operations and systems manager for the Computer Science Department, remarked on 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."

In addition to his contributions to the department as the student webmaster, Nathaniel has excelled in his scholastic endeavors as well.  Between the 2008 Winter and Fall semesters at BYU, Nathaniel completed a prestigious internship at Microsoft with the Hotmail team located in Silicon Valley.  His specific assignment was to work on the user-interface side of the email client.  Upon his graduation from BYU in December, Nathaniel will go on to work full-time with the same team at Microsoft.