The Student Technology Fee is home to my proudest works. UW students pay $38 / quarter into a the STF, amounting to $5 million annually which is later appropriated by a committee of 9 voting and 4 ex-officio members. I've spent over 4 years with the STF, starting as a liaison from the ASUW Student Senate. During summer 2015, I built a brand new website on node.js after the previous web-developer ghosted. I continued serving as an at-large member before being appointed Chair in March 2016.

My appointment came during a period of high uncertainty; the previous Chair resigned due to personal reasons, and the two governing student bodies saw the mid-season resignation as a time to address institutional issues. I was appointed co-Chair for the first three months along with Kiehl Sundt, previous Chair and reformer of a similar committee, SAF. In the first three months, I rewrote all the bylaws, reformed committee membership, created a new funding method, and implemented a new funding schedule. Additionally, Kiehl and I together completed the funding cycle, extended the fee to Summer Quarter, and lowered the quarterly cost.

Following the Spring Quarter changes, the committee unanimously voted to elect me Chair during the 2016 - 2017 year. During my senior year with the STF, I've steered the group through all the new changes, successfully completing three rounds of funding, opening communication, daylighting our processes, revising and writing policies, and working to ensure the STF provides tangible value to all students of the University of Washington. The role of Chair is a nebulous role, being what you make of it; some chairs have embraced the agency, while others have let it falter. My attention to detail, self-drive, and vision was perfectly suited for the role. This new STF is leaner, transparent, reactive, and efficient; I'm proud of my work with the STF.

Site Details

When I developed the website, I employed a custom content management system tailor-made for STF uses. My experience as a general member lent me deep understanding to committee needs. The website uses node.js's Express framework, pug.js templating, and a MySQL database all running on an AWS EC2 micro instance. Not only is the new site stylish, performant and low-impact, it also saves the committee over $300 a year in hosting costs compared to the previous one.