Andy will be retiring and his final day with ICIT will be Friday, March 12th. On behalf of the entire ICIT organization, we would like to say thank you for 35 years of service and dedication to UW-Whitewater. With 2 years at UW-Osh Kosh, that is a total of 37 years with UW-System!
Andy’s first position at UW-Whitewater was being a Cobol Applications programmer for the Financial Aid Office. He was responsible for the installation and integration of one of the campus’s first large third party software products that processed student financial aid information. The software was from the company, Sigma Systems, and called Student Aid Management (SAM).
The second position Andy undertook at UW-Whitewater was what was called System Programming. This position was a technical support position and at the time UWW was still using computer punch cards and lots of green & white bar paper. His position was created when two of the three key punch people left just as UWW was to migrate away from punch cards. He is probably the only person to help migrate two UW campuses away from computer punch cards. His position spent much time expanding the IBM green screen/3270 terminal environment, this eventually gave way to integrating IBM, DEC, Wang, Gandalf, token ring, fddi, atm, and Ethernet systems. Eventually Ethernet became the unifying environment and replaced all others. This is the position that he is currently involved in as he has gone from 80 character punch cards to 40 Gig Ethernet while working here.
Among some of Andy’s many accomplishments while here at Whitewater:
- The SAM system integration was a gigantic accomplishment and its successful deployment removed the campus away from having to stay abreast, interpret, and successfully program ever changing federal regulations.
- The successful migration of the campus network from the Cabletron vendor to the Cisco vendor. There were many hoops to jump through for the migration and establishing the routed environment.
- What Andy is most proud of is the many student workers that he has had over the years that have gone on to be successful in what they have chosen to do once they left UWW. A number of the students still send him cards during the holidays.
Andy’s advice, “Just keep an open mind as leadership all the way up to the UW-System President sets a direction that you may or may not agree with, decide to embrace it as an opportunity to better serve the students and to preserve their transcripts. After all, if it wasn’t for the students and their transcripts there would be no need for us.”
After retirement Andy and his wife plan to continue to provide encouragement to their daughter who enrolled in Vet. school in the Caribbean.
Please take a moment to wish Andy well on his retirement and thank him for his many years of hard work, service and dedication to UW-Whitewater. We will miss you Andy!