STA Blog

STA Work Blog

STAs: Student Technology Assistants

Who We Are
LAITS: IT and Facilities Director, Joe TenBarge initiated the Student Technology Assistant program in 2004. STAs are UT students who work on a variety of projects in collaboration with UT faculty and LAITS staff members. STAs assist College of Liberal Arts faculty members and administrative staff with print and web design. From building presentations, to creating audio/visual works, and producing online classes in the LAITS film studios, STAs are instrumental in helping COLA faculty realize their vision for multimedia projects that enhance their teaching and the students learning experience. By the end of their student careers, STAs have portfolios which demonstrate their accrued technical and design skills.

Prospective STAs:

Creative and technically inclined students are appointed as STAs for one year, with the possibility of being rehired as long as they study at the university. Applicants for the program are hired before both long semesters. Interested students may look for postings on Hire-A-Longhorn when positions are available. Positions will have Student Technology Assistant (illustrator or web designer) in the title of the job post.

Faculty and Staff:

Faculty & Staff with questions about services, please contact us.

https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/laits/contacts.php

  • Audio Services: Michael C Heidenreich, Director of Studio Operations & STA Program Coordinator
  • Video Services: Kelly Webster, Video Production Supervisor, Video STA Supervisor
  • Graphic Design & Web Design Services: Suloni Robertson, Art Director / Design & Coding STA Supervisor

First Day!

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Today is my first day as an STA! I met Chloe, Jaclyn, Rodrigo, Tate, and Emily. I look forward to working with everyone and learning from all these talented people! To start, Jaclyn walked me through orientation with the help of Suloni. I read through the STA Handbook and set up my logins for Harvest, Slack, and Basecamp. We reviewed the process of clocking in, updating my time sheets, and navigating the project management software.

 

As my first assignment, I completed a short powerpoint outlining five points from the STA handbook. Suloni introduced me to the Noun Project and I was pleasantly lost in a sea of icons.

First slide of my STA Handbook Powerpoint
2019-Jan23-OliviaWilczekDownload

The last task during my shift involved creating my blog banner and uploading this blogpost! Next week I will work on my caricature assignment and meet with Sydney for my first UX/UI project. Looking forward to learning more!

Olivia Wilczek ~ STA Orientation 2019 Spring!

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Welcome Olivia 🙂 i hope you have fun at your STA Orientation!

During the latter part of your STA Orientation, you’ll design and upload your banner to this blog.

FIRST STEP Photoshop: Design and make your banner

a. Use the photoshop specs for your blog banner that i placed in your STA folder, on our servers: path: sta/SanikaBhave folder: make-your-sta-blog-banner file: sta-blog-banner-specs.jpg

b. Save your un-merged files back to your STA folder: path: sta/VSanikaBhave folder: make-your-sta-blog-banner SECOND STEP On this Blog: Make your 1st text post and upload your banner:-) a. log-in: https://sta.laits.utexas.edu/wp-admin _

b. Publishing Help Documentation/Instructions You must read this WP sites “Publishing Help” before you upload your banner. Click on each of these links and read the STA publishing help: https://sta.laits.utexas.edu/wp-admin/admin.php?page=wp-help-documents&document=115 https://sta.laits.utexas.edu/wp-admin/admin.php?page=wp-help-documents&document=18881

NEXT STEP : Add a post

c. Blog post: Reflect on the day and write a bit about your about your-self & what you did during orientation & upload your banner.

ABOUT IMAGES: do not merely copy paste images in to your blog. Always upload images into the “Media” section of blog first, and then set the image from the media folder to display on your blog.

ABOUT CATEGORIES: Check the “2018 Fall – 2019 Spring” Category box for all the blog posts you make this semester and next semester so that all of your work is documented in the correct semesters.

LASTLY Comment on Basecamp:  Let us know you’ve completed this task, via base camp. Upload a link to this blog, on your base camp to-do:https://3.basecamp.com/4001554/buckets/7892081/todos/1547763221

12-19-18

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Last Day as an STA

It’s my last day working as an STA! This has a been an amazing job to have as a college student and I’m so grateful for the opportunity. I’ve been able to learn a lot about the process of design creation and workflow in a professional setting, which has been really helpful to me as an English major looking to develop my tech and design skills.

Suloni has been a kind and patient supervisor to me and I’ve enjoyed working with all the STAs. I’m taking some time off this spring so I won’t be returning next semester, but I’m hoping to be back for the summer months, so I’m looking forward to that!

Bridget

Department of History Promotional Materials and Some More Vlabs

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Department of History Promotional Materials and Some More Vlabs

 

I was able to come in this week to work on some promotional materials for an event hosted by the Department of History. The event is a talk featuring historian Andrew Roberts on Winston Churchill. I liked the look of a sleek and simple black and white poster for a powerful historical figure such as Churchill so that’s what I went off from. I have a couple of iterations and here are some of them.

 

 

One of the iterations features just a simple high contrast black and white photo of Churchill that blends in to the background. The other one features a portrait of Churchill composed of text from his infamous “We Shall Fight on the Beaches” speech (however, I do not know how well it reads…). Lastly, the flyers contain a little more body text about the speaker so I decided to add a picture of him however I’m still trying to come up with solutions on how to combine both Churchill and the speaker into a more cohesive layout.

 

Last Post

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My Last post as an STA

I just want to thank everyone I’ve met over my 1 1/2 years here at LAITS. It’s been a pleasure and it truly was an amazing way to start in the tech industry and I recommend it if you are trying to get started in either graphic design or programming. Everyone here is incredibly talented and Suloni was an amazing boss. I will miss her and everyone else I’ve worked with over my time here. I never would’ve thought I’d get to work at Microsoft right out of college, I always thought it was a far away dream. LAITS gave me experience and knowledge to pursue my dream and make it a reality and I will forever be grateful for that. I will be working on Azure AI at Microsoft which, honestly, I have no idea what that entails, but it sounds awesome. It’s been a crazy fun ride here and I’m so so glad I got to experience it. I wouldn’t trade this experience for anything else.

Warfield Center Publications Collage

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Warfield Center Faculty Publications

Justice from the Center for African & African American Studies wanted me to reorganize the current list of faculty publications in Cascade which looked like this: 

they first wanted a collage as for the masthead which I just made in photoshop:

I then organized the rest of the publications using HTML tables which is basically the only thing you can do within the confines of cascade so now it looks like this: 

For those interested the code for this looks like this:

We basically just set up a table with 4 sections each of 25% width which divides the table into 4 columns. If you want to see the live result on the website here’s the link:  https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/caaas/faculty/books.php