On Wednesday, March 27, 2024 the UMass President’s Office hosted three rising seniors from Sutton High School for a day to shadow some of our employees.
Amanda Gordon, Kristina England, and Deb Fisher showed Sydney, Alanah, and Allison the ins and outs of their jobs in their respective departments.
Sydney started the day off with Deb Fisher & Deb Hight by learning the various functions of the REQ2PO team. She was intrigued on how the punchouts work. She sat with Vicky Berg to learn a little about the budgeting world. Pam Giordano walked her through the process of creating a contract. Kim Mailloux, Jill Lemire and Toby Lau spent some time with her talking about the various functions of the sourcing team. Sydney also had the pleasure of attending a manager’s meeting with Kelsey McCauley.
Alanah shadowed the Digital Experience team for the day. From a digital accessibility standpoint, she learned about accessibility features that are built right into her iPhone and Mac computer, including speech recognition software, the VoiceOver screen reader, and reduced motion settings. She was also shown the daily work done to maintain the UMass websites, including code development, quality assurance, graphic design, and user experience changes that are being made to the website. She shadowed both Kristina England (Digital Experience and Accessibility Specialist) and Tracy Axelson (Senior Web Developer) throughout the day.
Allison sat with Amanda Gordon for the first part of the day. Amanda gave her a summary of how UPST came to be formed and how the different AP functions for all the campuses used to work. She showed her the AP inbox and explained how the team divides up the work and the different types of transactions that are handled. Rob Hyde took over while Amanda facilitated the UPST Managers Meeting, which both Allison and Sydney attended and were able to observe the collaboration between everyone.
After lunch Allison sat with Aubrey Gauthier and was able to see some subaward transactions and a wire payment along with Direct Payments. Kendra Sheppard spent some time going over OCR (Digital Capture) and how AI is coming into play in various ways and Jazmine Belkin on the BAT team sat with her and went over Salesforce and case management.
The career exploration program is encouraged by their guidance counselor which gives students a chance to experience the real world of work. They had a very busy and very successful day!