I have been feeling very nostalgic lately as I have been watching Utah Valley State College become Utah Valley University. It has brought back many memories for me. As I was lying in bed tonight I couldn't sleep and was thinking about the old days. I decided to get up and write a little personal history. This is will be a real snoozer for anyone else reading it. But I felt it was important to write some of this down.
After I graduated from high school I went to Ricks College. I had a not so pleasant experience there, but we'll leave that one for another post. I was finishing up my first year there, I had registered for classes for Fall, I had found all new roommates to start the next year, things were looking up. I remember one Sunday leaving in the middle of church feeling very uneasy. I went to the football stadium that was across from my apartment and sat on the bleachers reading my scriptures and praying like I never had before. I was looking through my little hymn book and came across the song "Lead Kindly Light." I began to sob as I read the words. I felt the spirit so strongly that day. I felt that I was to go to UVSC that Fall and not come back to Ricks. UVSC was never really one of my choices for school. I kind of felt it was the school that only people who couldn't get into anywhere else went. But I knew that I couldn't deny my feelings so I cancelled all of my classes and lost the deposit on my apartment and went home for the summer.
I went to UVSC during the summer to meet with an advisor and found that they had the exact major that I had wanted - Desktop Publishing. While I was meeting with the advisor she asked me if I was looking for a job, I said, Why, yes I am. She picked up the phone and called a department there and then told me to go to the High School Relations office for an interview. I was sitting there in shorts and a t-shirt and told her I wasn't really prepared for an interview. She some how convinced me to go anyway. I went down and interviewed and was hired.
I worked in the High School Relations office part time and went to school full time. I was definitely a grunt - I spent my time stuffing envelopes and doing data entry, it was no wonder they didn't care if I was in shorts and a t-shirt. I worked with five of the most amazing women though. I will forever be grateful for their love and friendship to me. I later started going on the high school tour with them - which means traveling to different High Schools all over the state of Utah and giving presentations about why you should choose UVSC. I would also go and present high school students with scholarships that they had received.
During the time we spent with high school seniors it became apparent that we needed to have a better way to get information to them. We would copy degree requirements, catalog pages etc and mail them to every student who filled out a card. This cost a lot of money and was very tedious. This will date me, but before then the only website that UVSC had was about 5 pages that some IT guy had thrown out there. It had no real value. The Internet was just being to explode at this point in time. So Lisa Asay (co-worker) bought a book "HTML for Beginners" and started to learn how to make a web page. I soon joined her and together we managed to publish the catalog and we started putting all of the degree requirements online, linking them to the catalog to view the course descriptions. We also put the class schedule online, linked to the course descriptions. Apparently what we had done had not been done at colleges before. We ended up traveling to all sorts of conferences presenting our "Cutting Edge Technology." I even went to Washington D.C. to present at a national educators conference. It was an amazing time. Looking back, I had no idea what we had started when we put the first course catalog online.
After I graduated from high school I went to Ricks College. I had a not so pleasant experience there, but we'll leave that one for another post. I was finishing up my first year there, I had registered for classes for Fall, I had found all new roommates to start the next year, things were looking up. I remember one Sunday leaving in the middle of church feeling very uneasy. I went to the football stadium that was across from my apartment and sat on the bleachers reading my scriptures and praying like I never had before. I was looking through my little hymn book and came across the song "Lead Kindly Light." I began to sob as I read the words. I felt the spirit so strongly that day. I felt that I was to go to UVSC that Fall and not come back to Ricks. UVSC was never really one of my choices for school. I kind of felt it was the school that only people who couldn't get into anywhere else went. But I knew that I couldn't deny my feelings so I cancelled all of my classes and lost the deposit on my apartment and went home for the summer.
I went to UVSC during the summer to meet with an advisor and found that they had the exact major that I had wanted - Desktop Publishing. While I was meeting with the advisor she asked me if I was looking for a job, I said, Why, yes I am. She picked up the phone and called a department there and then told me to go to the High School Relations office for an interview. I was sitting there in shorts and a t-shirt and told her I wasn't really prepared for an interview. She some how convinced me to go anyway. I went down and interviewed and was hired.
I worked in the High School Relations office part time and went to school full time. I was definitely a grunt - I spent my time stuffing envelopes and doing data entry, it was no wonder they didn't care if I was in shorts and a t-shirt. I worked with five of the most amazing women though. I will forever be grateful for their love and friendship to me. I later started going on the high school tour with them - which means traveling to different High Schools all over the state of Utah and giving presentations about why you should choose UVSC. I would also go and present high school students with scholarships that they had received.
During the time we spent with high school seniors it became apparent that we needed to have a better way to get information to them. We would copy degree requirements, catalog pages etc and mail them to every student who filled out a card. This cost a lot of money and was very tedious. This will date me, but before then the only website that UVSC had was about 5 pages that some IT guy had thrown out there. It had no real value. The Internet was just being to explode at this point in time. So Lisa Asay (co-worker) bought a book "HTML for Beginners" and started to learn how to make a web page. I soon joined her and together we managed to publish the catalog and we started putting all of the degree requirements online, linking them to the catalog to view the course descriptions. We also put the class schedule online, linked to the course descriptions. Apparently what we had done had not been done at colleges before. We ended up traveling to all sorts of conferences presenting our "Cutting Edge Technology." I even went to Washington D.C. to present at a national educators conference. It was an amazing time. Looking back, I had no idea what we had started when we put the first course catalog online.
I found a picture of when I went to D.C.
Lisa and I eventually broke off from High School Relations forming the Web Center. We managed the entire website for UVSC. We would make pages for each department on campus.
I had been working part time up to this point and going to school full-time. As a way to become full time I broke away for awhile with Mairlyn Mansfield (my boss with High School Relations) and together we started up the Utah Electronic Community College. This was a consortium of all the community colleges in the state of Utah. We brought together everyone's online courses and offered them in one place. I have no idea what it really does today. I basically got it up and running and left after less than a year to go back to the web center.
Once back in the new "Web Development Center" I became a web designer. I started learning new programming languages like PHP and started several SQL databases. One of my projects I was most proud of was creating an online application for employment. The information was entered into a form and put into a database for the HR department to later review. It sounds pretty basic now, but at the time this was way cool.
I also had the opportunity to start teaching as an Adjunct Professor on campus. I taught the Beginning HTML class for three semesters.
I worked for UVSC for seven years. I left almost seven years ago when Whitney was born. I have never regretted that decision to leave. Being a mom is the best job in the world and I wouldn't trade it for anything. So many great things came from me leaving Ricks. Most important being that I moved into the same ward as Aaron, that will be a story for another post. I also gained some fantastic roommates like Tamsen and Kristin that are still some of my best friends today.
There is nothing left to know that I existed there. Everything has long since been changed and improved. Technology has changed so much that there is no way I could ever do this job again. But it was fun while it lasted.
Anyway, Congratulations to all those at Utah Valley University. We only dreamed of university status when I was there. I can't believe that it has become a reality.
