2018 Student Impact Award Winners

Congrats to the two winners of the 2018 Student Impact Award. Below are excerpts from the nominations that were submitted by their respective supervisors. 

Howard Schulman    

Made In Space Inc., 
Spring and Summer 2017

What impact did the student have on your organization?
   Howie was our best employee for the majority of the time he spent here which was about a year. He not only worked as hard as he could and have great results but he would constantly be seeking out to help others. No matter what was happening he had a smile on his face and was ready to meet the challenge of the day. Every single person in the company was somewhat saddened by his departure when he went back to school.

What makes this student stand out among others and deserving of the Student Impact award?
   Howie is an example of the high quality employees that OSU produces. We have had well over three dozen interns at this company since it was founded and Howie was, by far, the hardest working and producer of the most work product. Outside of his outstanding work ethic and overall attitude, he took on some very challenging projects. Since the projects he worked on are currently proprietary I can only vaguely touch on his involvement, but most excitedly he started a flight program, in his spare time, that is currently being developed into a payload that will be delivered to the International Space Station within a year. This payload will test a process that has potential benefit if used back on Earth.

Kyle Thompson    

CoverMyMeds,
Spring and Autumn 2017

What is one specific accomplishment of your intern/co-op?
   Kyle worked in several applications of ours (and is notoriously blazingly fast to understand code and come up with pull requests), but I'll cite his biggest accomplishment while here as helping us with a rescue project of our CoverMyChat application. When I took over the team as engineering manager, my biggest new challenge was to "fix chat". It was horrifically slow/inefficient, and barely usable by our support team at times of peak load. Other developers in the company and even consultants had looked at it and immediately wanted to dismiss it as a "must rewrite". Starting over was not an option when so much company investment had been made, and Kyle was a member of the (very small) team that we tasked with this rescue. After a lot of patience and 2-3 months of effort, chat was reborn! Max response times were previously peaking at 30+ seconds before the updates, and dropped swiftly to a sane sub-second response time. I have charts! Even among developers with years of experience, it is rare to find someone with the level of maturity that Kyle possesses to solve a complex problem in someone else's "legacy" code without just wanting to throw it all away and start over.

What makes this student stand out among others and deserving of the Student Impact award?
   Kyle has discipline/maturity/work-ethic that is rare. Coupled with a level of technical aptitude that is also rare, this is a powerful combination. Here's one more example of Kyle's commitment to making things better - one evening he was staying behind for a developer meet-up event, and we'd had problems with a server going into swap earlier that day. He started digging around in some code and issued a patch within a few minutes once he diagnosed it. Other engineers had missed it so far. This was in his "off-time"!