The thriving Illinois community is made up of members of all kinds—students, faculty, staff, volunteers, affiliates, alumni—and many Tech Services staff have long been part of many of these groups. While working full-time for Tech Services, many staff have also served as adjunct faculty and instructors on campus.
Specifically, four of our staff have talked about how working full-time at Tech Services while teaching has helped shape their sense of the Illinois community and have benefitted both roles. Read about Michael Curtin.
Today, we share about Ashley Hetrick, data engineer at Tech Services and course instructor of both graduate and undergraduate-level courses in data, text mining and social media analytics.
Ashley Hetrick’s first taste of Illinois was as a Ph.D student in the English department, where she was both teacher and student. There, she fell in love with teaching and learning.
“I started my journey as a teacher by first being a student. I taught for several years [in the English department] as part of my own training in big, complicated, frustrating ideas. And I absolutely loved it… I quickly found that teaching helped me better understand concepts in which I thought I was already an expert,” said Hetrick.
Since her days as an instructor and student, Hetrick has worked at Tech Services managing teams of students working in IT and has worked with IT communications content. She has also worked in leadership in research data management at the University Library. Throughout these roles, her roots as an instructor have allowed her an easy transition into management and supervisory roles in IT, “despite the difference in environment and content.”
She said, “I used to evaluate folks on how they engaged with Douglass and Thoreau. As an IT manager and supervisor, I evaluated folks on how they engaged with customers and computers. As a data engineering instructor, I evaluate folks on how they engage with data cleaning and train their machine learning models.”
Now, Ashley Hetrick works as a data engineer at Tech Services building data pipelines and helping others better utilize their data. Even so, she has continued to seek out opportunities to teach, mentor and coach. She has taught a number of courses and given a number of workshops on campus that have enabled her to contribute to the environment of collaboration and growth Illinois is known for.
“Teachers and IT leaders alike create environments where people feel comfortable learning and trying things out until they make something better than when they first started. For us in IT, that ‘something better’ can be an interaction with a customer, a service, a script or tool,” she said.
Hetrick has taught graduate-level courses, Data Cleaning in Theory & Practice (IS 537) and Text Mining (IS 567) and also an advanced undergraduate course, Social Media Analytics (ADV 480). Hetrick has also taught workshops on programming in Python and Excel, formal logic, relational database design and development, data management and curation and management principles. She has also mentored others about management and job crafting through Women in Technology and the IT Manager Development Program.
“Teaching helped me understand that the big, complicated, frustrating ideas I loved were even bigger and more complicated than I’d thought! And also simpler, and more poignant for it. I teach because I want to empower others with the tools and resources they need to better understand and engage with the world. In the process, I also better understand and engage with the world,” said Hetrick.
Still connected to her Illinois roots as a student in the English department, Hetrick re-reads Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” from Leaves of Grass every spring to reflect on Whitman as one of her favorite and most complicated teachers.
“The very first word of ‘Song of Myself’ is ‘I,’ and the very last word is ‘you.’ I think about that a lot: that between ‘you’ and ‘I’ is a whole universe of shared knowledge and experience. And I think that may be the truest representation of what it means to teach,” she said. “When I create environments where teaching and learning happen, I like to think that I’m helping people really learn how to trust themselves and their own abilities to create good things and experiences. I like to think that that’s a very Illinois thing to say.”