Gary L. Belleville
Student Employee Appreciation Week
Student Employee of the Year, 2009/10
Ashley Martz
Ashley is a senior. Majoring in Elementary Language Arts and minor Elementary Social Studies.
Ashley was nominated by Vunsin Doubblestein. Department of Multicultural Affairs.
Following is Ashley's winning nomination:
Ashley was initially hired as an office assistant whose main job responsibility was to assist with filing. She was a sophomore then. Within the first few weeks, she has impressed me tremendously with her motivation and aptitude. She was able to complete every task assigned to her promptly and to my satisfaction – I am very particular when it comes to how I want things done and some people may call me a demanding supervisor. I recognized her potential and gradually gave her more responsibilities and increased her pay, and she embraced the challenge with great enthusiasm.
Ashley's primary responsibilities include supervising other student employees and being in charge of the program in my absence. She also ensures that time sheets are filled out correctly and turned in on time for over 20 peer mentors/tutors who do not have regular office hours and office space, so everything is done through e-mail. Coordinating this is no easy feat. Ashley is also responsible for reviewing our online student activity logs on a weekly basis to ensure that our peer mentors/tutors are updating them on a regular basis. She has about 300 student logs to go through every week! In addition to reading the logs, she has to print them out, file them, make appropriate recommendations to me, and sometimes conduct meetings with peer mentors/tutors who have not met the minimum requirements of their jobs.
In addition to that, she has developed and coordinated various workshops for our participants by recruiting presenters, making room reservations, and publicizing events to participants. She created a grant during her first year to enable two of our participants to attend the National Conference for College Women Student Leaders in Washington, D.C. These two participants were selected based on strict eligibility criteria. She oversaw the competitive selection process as well as made hotel reservations and travel arrangements for these participants. The two participants had a wonderful experience and gained knowledge that would be helpful to them when they enter the profession of their choice.
As I am the only full-time professional staff in a grant-funded program with over 20 student employees and over 300 program participants annually, Ashley is an invaluable asset to me and an indispensable part of the program. She always goes the extra mile and continuously exceeds my expectations for her. Her dedication to her job is infectious. She has a warm, bubbly personality and makes our office a fun place to work at. She is also highly responsible, perceptive, and competent. She demonstrates good insight, thoughtfulness, and judgment in everything that she does. She makes my job so much easier! I honestly do not know what I would do without her. Most of the time I forget that she is a student employee. This is because her quality of work far surpasses that of a regular student employee and she always behaves in a professional manner. She is often mistaken for a full-time regular employee by others!