Celebrating BU’s Best Student Employees

Honored as Students and Supervisors of the Year are Joe Ferme (CAS’15) (from left), Stephanie Creag (CFA’15), Zachary Bos (GRS’16), Sweekriti Satpathy (GRS’15), Rachel Ceccarelli (SPH’15), and Amy Shanler (CAS’96, COM’96,’04). Photo by Jackie Ricciardi

Between attending classes and serving as president of BU’s Student Government, Joe Ferme found time to take on a job training new student workers at Admissions.

Ferme (CAS’15) was named Undergraduate Student Employee of the Year at the annual Student Employee of the Year award ceremony, held last Thursday at the Castle. Also honored at the ceremony were Sweekriti Satpathy (GRS’15), named the Graduate Student Employee of the Year, Stephanie Creag (CFA’15), who won the Undergraduate Outstanding Service Award, and Rachel Ceccarelli (SPH’15), honored with the Graduate Outstanding Service Award. The Student Employees of the Year each received $300, and the Outstanding Service Awardees earned $100.

Every year, about 10,000 students help to keep the University running smoothly by working various jobs around campus—serving food in Dining Services, fixing computer bugs for Information Services & Technology, and tutoring fellow students, among many others. BU student supervisors can nominate one of their employees for Student Employee of the Year by writing a letter of recommendation, addressing the student’s quality of work, leadership skills, and impact on the department. The Student Employment Office then sends the top nominations to a five-person panel of judges from different BU departments.

In his role as ambassador training coordinator, Ferme helps train 275 student employees who will eventually lead Admissions tours of campus for potential students and their parents. “We cover walking backwards while giving a tour, but more importantly, I tell students to share what their lives are like at BU,” Ferme says. “You don’t need to sell BU—it sells itself.”

In nominating Ferme for the honor, Admissions assistant director Leah McDermott wrote, “the sheer logistics of scheduling and keeping track of the number of people and number of events is only matched by Joe’s ability to be nimble and flexible when all does not go according to plan. Joe produces the same quality of work that I expect from my professional colleagues.”

Satpathy is an IS&T educational technology assistant for the School of Law Graduate Tax Program, where she helps faculty develop course content and teaches them the blackboard system, among other duties. “I deal with professors who are experts in their fields, and I can help them fix these really small problems,” she says. “They’re so appreciative.”

Professors aren’t the only people who appreciate her. Last semester during finals, Satpathy “made sure to be available during off hours to help answer any questions the students might have when they take their exam,” wrote Kacie Cleary, an IS&T senior educational technologist, in her nomination letter. “Despite the fact that she herself was also taking finals during this time, she was willing to assist students in the evenings.”

Creag has worked in the LAW dean’s office for three years, providing administrative help and training fellow students. She was nominated by Jenny Carron (CAS’08), executive assistant to the dean, who lauded Creag’s ability to apply her artistic side to her office work. “She is creative, flexible, and intuitive, but also rational, objective, and systematic,” she wrote. “She is an artist, yet she works on spreadsheets and data entry with the same ease as she does creative projects. These skills allow her to view issues and projects through different lenses; she adds a unique perspective to every project that she works on.”

Ceccarelli is a staff and project assistant at the Clinical and Translational Science Institute. In the words of her supervisor, finance and operations manager Ebony Lynnette Green Ashley, Ceccarelli “exhibits a very high-quality work level in everything that she does, from cleaning the CTSI kitchen to, in the midst of chaos, re-creating symposium name tags and certificates on the spot during a live event. She maintains poise no matter what and finds ways to supplement rather than take away.”

Supervisors were also honored at the ceremony: chosen this year’s Supervisor of the Year is Zachary Bos (GRS’16), who works as the administrative coordinator in the College of Arts & Sciences Core Curriculum office. Runner-up is Amy Shanler (CAS’96, COM’96,’04), a College of Communication associate professor of the practice of public relations, who also runs the PRLab, COM’s student-run public relations agency.

Each year the nominations of the students chosen as Boston University’s Graduate and Undergraduate Student Employees of the Year are submitted to the Northeast Association of Student Employment Administrators for consideration for state, regional, and national recognition.