I joined the Whitewater Student Government as the IT Director for the 2009-2010 school year. My responsibilities included maintaining the website, researching new technologies for the organization, and many other things. One of my main projects was to conduct research on a possible new solution for the Whitewater Student Government Housing Guide. The one that was currently in operation was programmed in ASP by another student. The software worked fairly well, but we wanted to add a few features and the current software was very buggy. So I began my months of research in the Fall of 2009, looking for where we could implement a new software solution that would grant the Whitewater Student Government the most stable, scalable software platform while maintaining data ownership of their listings.
I first spoke with Cyber Solutions, who fixed an upload issue with the prior housing guide before. They brought forth their already developed solution that was completely customizable. I was pretty interested, so I sent them a development concept to see if it was feasible. That document is located here:
After I sent the documentation off to Cyber Solutions, a student approached me asking me if he could propose a solution to the senate. I agreed to take in all bidders. His solution was to embed a Joomla based website that would host the housing guide. Our final path that we could take was to implement a new housing guide on our own using a software like Joomla or WordPress. The hardest part about my job was to take all of this technical jargin and translate it into English so that the senate could make an educated decision. The best way to do it was to break everything down into pieces, so I looked at all the solutions advantages and disadvantages carefully and scored each solutions strengths and weaknesses on a points system. I gave a presentation at the end of my research recommending which solution would be best. View the presentation here:
Even though I gave my recommendation, the senate decided not to change anything with the housing guide. There were a few political left hooks thrown and some VERY long meetings that changed the course of the housing guide. Long story short, I learned a lot on how a government organization works. It was a great experience for me and it is something that I would never regret in my life. There were some great people that I networked with while serving on the Whitewater Student Government and I felt honored to work with many of the people in the organization. It was one of the best experiences that I have had on campus. I also reinforced a lot of my experience with many technologies.
Technologies that I used as WSG IT Director:
- HTML
- CSS
- ASP
- PHP
- Apache Web Server
- MySQL
- Microsoft Access
- SQL Programming
- Microsoft Visio
- Adobe Photoshop
- Adobe Illustrator
