Written by Jim Phillips, ITS Campus Engagement
Tinkering with Technology from a Young Age
One consistent theme evident across the ITS student profile series: All of the students interviewed thus far have displayed a fondness for tinkering with technology from a young age.
Meet Tim Haygood! He too found endless fascination in all things technical and pushed his childhood computer gadgets to their absolute limits. His penchant for engineering continues to this day in the form of experimentation with Raspberry Pi’s and writing code for singly-addressable LED strips.
Graduating and Job Hunting during the Pandemic
Tim graduated in March 2020 with a degree in Computer Science at UCSC. Unfortunate timing for those new graduates who set about to test the job market as unemployment skyrocketed in response to the uncertainty caused by the pandemic. Thankfully, due to his academic status and his good-standing as an ITS student employee, Tim was able to continue working in ITS for the remainder of the 2020 calendar year.
Prior to working in ITS, Tim worked in facilities for the Jack Baskin School of Engineering. Sensing a need to push himself, Tim recalled his decision to make a career move,
“ITS was clearly the best place for me because I could grow my skills and work with great people. I wasn’t sure that there would be full-time opportunities, but I wanted to use the skills I had been acquiring over the last four years.”
Showcasing Technical Expertise
Tim has put those skills to work, initially with the Information Security team, but then with the Identity and Access Management team where he was able to showcase his technical expertise. Acknowledging the help he received along the way, Tim observed,
“I was supervised by Tamara Santos in ITS. She has been amazingly helpful in launching my career. She knew the importance of letting me branch out and work on a variety of projects to build a good reputation in ITS.”
Tamara was instrumental in advocating for Tim and helping him get hired back into ITS after he graduated. Ever appreciative of her support and encouragement, Tim described that without her efforts he “would be drifting in the impossible entry-level job market of the pandemic economy.”
Accomplishment to be Proud Of
Tim is particularly proud of his accomplishment in support of the ITS Reorganization Inventory project led by Leslie Geary. The task at hand was to allow ITS staff who were all together in person (pre-pandemic) at a large event to quickly and collaboratively contribute information regarding work that they currently do or had done previously on projects and teams.
Tim was able to apply his programming skills and his knowledge of Google Apps Scripts to make it easier to manage the huge mass of data that was being collected. Tim described one of his scripts, which “took all of the data currently available in the inventory spreadsheet and turned each row into a neatly formatted document that could then be printed out so people could add notes or make corrections during the live, on-campus event.” The elaborate custom-written UI that Tim designed was extremely customizable. The Google scripts Tim created for this event have been used subsequently for a variety of other projects as well. In addition, this work has inspired research into the potential for in-house Google plugin development, which may provide a way to meet campus business needs without the security risks that come with third party plugins.
Leslie commented on the broader applicability of Tim’s work, “The Google scripts Tim created for this event have been used subsequently for a variety of other projects as well. In addition, this work has inspired research into the potential for in-house Google plugin development, which may provide a way to meet campus business needs without the security risks that come with third-party plugins.”
From Tim’s perspective, working on projects such as this aligned with his longer-term aspirations of becoming a software engineer.
Landing a Position in ITS
Because Tim was a rockstar student employee he’s been offered a temporary but full-time position with the Web Development team in ITS, which he hopes will turn into a permanent position. His advice for students thinking about working in ITS? Keep the bigger picture in mind:
“If the opportunity is given to you, absolutely take it and do not treat it as just another job. You will get a chance to apply yourself and be surrounded by great mentors and colleagues while you do it.”
