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.
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 & Staff with questions about services, please contact us.
https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/laits/contacts.php
I finished another RUS412 watercolor background for Tate this week:
[initial sketch]
After I started coloring the background, I started working on the tree. Originally, the branch that extends further was too long, so I had to shorten it. But overall, I think Tate was satisfied with the finished product!
I also worked briefly on the STA patch designs. I didn’t really put much time/effort into them, but they were just basic ideas I played around with:
I’ve pretty much finished all my COLA Photo ID assignments last shift, so I’m just doing some basic training right now by making psd flashcards and spending more time on Photoshop. I also have come up with a design for the STA Level 4 Patch!
Triangles are the best shapes to put into other shapes.
I’m gonna keep running with this idea/concept and keep on going!
I published my COLA Photo IDs from yesterday after they were approved! I sent out a couple of emails regarding the photo IDs and started working on the Psych CE logo and the STA Level 4 Patch design. I had to stop with the Psych CE logo because we weren’t doing it anymore, so I started brainstorming ideas for the patch.
Some rough ideas for the STA Patch Design.
I’ll try to come up with better, more solid designs next shift!
Today I worked on some more COLA Photo IDs!
These are the two faculty/staff COLA Photo IDs I worked on today.
I’m currently waiting on approval before sending them out.
Few weeks later, I am finally done with the seashore watercolor background!! I colored in the birch trees and fixed some of the other colors (for the water) by using color overlay:
I also fixed the homepage banner for RUS412 – I darkened the background so that you can really see the christmas lights hanging, as well as an intensified focus on the characters:
I also got another watercolor background assignment from Tate. This time, I had to re-do the airport scene. It was really fun, and I unexpectedly finished it a little too ~early~ because I was being ~too efficient~ haha!!… I am now waiting for another assignment from either Kathy/ Tate.
I had the opportunity to work for Amazon this summer in Seattle and it was probably one of the most intense summer’s I have ever had. As someone who has not lived outside of Texas since the age of 5 it was a very dramatic shift in scenery and culture that I had not expected. To start with all the food was delicious. There are so many more varieties of food and the food truck scene is even bigger than in Austin! The only thing that was bad was the “mexican” food. Also the nature was incredible! I now see how people can go on hikes in the summer because the weather is actually perfect (besides the first 2 weeks I was there when it rained the entire time, which was a nice welcome to Seattle). In Texas you’d probably die if you went on a long hike in the middle of the day during Summer. Here’s a picture of a hike called Rattlesnake Ridge:
and another hike we did called Twin Falls:
In terms of my actual internship I worked on the backend for the Customer Service team at Amazon. At Amazon they have small (6-8 people) teams for just about every operation within Amazon. My team specifically handled customer service surveys. My intern project was to write code to automatically send/not send surveys based on certain criteria. For example if the customer service call was disconnected you do not send a survey. To accomplish this I had to design a brand new back-end API using Java which returned a true of false after doing a series of checks within different Amazon systems. The culture at Amazon is to basically let someone at a project with little to no help and see if they survive/ask for help themselves. This was especially stressful because I had no idea this was the case. I thought I was just being ignored at first but it turns out people were waiting for me to reach out. Towards the end of the project I was messaging people who I previously thought were just some high up people that I could never talk to. I learned that there is also a lot of bureaucracy that goes on in big companies. In school I’m used to diving head first into a project without much thought, yet at these companies literally everything you do has to be approved by ~1 million people. It sucks but I can see why it’s necessary so you don’t mess up anything big! In fact during my time there the entire website crashed once and there was mass pandemonium.
Overall, the experience was enlightening but it definitely was not my the job I was looking for. I think that the culture at Amazon fits a certain type of person, which I am not. Seattle itself was amazing, and I highly recommend visiting if you have not!