Award Type: VTTC 2024

Jerry Peters and Jeff Kling

Many thanks to Jerry for confirming that “hope” will show up for maintenance this weekend and ensuring the maintenance message was on point. Thank you, Jeff, for being a good sport and playing along about “hope” when I confused you for Jerry. (By the way, “hope” is the parts and non-ITS people needed for maintenance this weekend.) Thanks again, Jerry and Jeff, for making work enjoyable.

-Christina Crockett

Brad Sullivan

Orientations have moved up the time for Green & Gold by 15 minutes, and for some reason, I couldn’t edit the invites to all my awesome volunteers. I was panicked. Brad brought much-needed levity and helped me out. I appreciate his speedy help and reassurance that it wasn’t me. From one “tab hoarder” to another, many thanks!

-Christina Crockett

Ayo Ajiboye

Today I received excellent IT support from Ayo, who helped me understand what Microsoft’s upcoming changes will mean and how to protect my data. He was very patient, knowledgeable, and helpful. I can only imagine how challenging your jobs must be and can’t tell you how much it means to have such a responsive and supportive GMU IT team to turn to. My experiences with IT have always been positive and Ayo went above and beyond today. Thank you!!

-Diane Wagner

Toni Mehrman

I wanted to take a moment to express my deepest gratitude for Toni’s exceptional support throughout the process of ordering my computer and navigating through the intricacies of the invoice situation.

Toni’s meticulous attention to detail and proactive approach truly made the entire experience seamless and efficient. Her willingness to go above and beyond to ensure that every aspect was taken care of is not only commendable but also invaluable. Knowing that I had someone as reliable and knowledgeable as her to guide me through each step was incredibly reassuring.

Her professionalism and unwavering dedication have left a lasting impression, and I am genuinely thankful for all that she has done. It’s evident that her efforts have not gone unnoticed, and I feel fortunate to have had the privilege of working alongside her.

I want to extend my sincerest appreciation for Toni’s outstanding assistance. I eagerly anticipate the opportunity to collaborate with her again in the future.
Please convey my heartfelt thanks to Toni and please acknowledge her exemplary work ethic.

-Friba Alizai

Matt Berlejung and Brad Sullivan

I am supremely grateful and impressed by the customer service I recently received from Matt and Brad. For about a month, I experienced ongoing issues with a Teams space I own, where the standard method for unarchiving private channels was not working correctly and resulted in a number of errors. Matt and Brad were quick to help troubleshoot, walk me through a number of technical steps, and finally involve Microsoft for further escalation. They remained steadfast through the multitude of requests for logs, ensuring communication between the vendor was timely and effective, and continued to offer additional troubleshooting suggestions as new information was learned and the problem still persisted. In addition to the troubleshooting on my end, Matt and Brad conducted a number of more advanced technical solutions on their end, and through their combined efforts my issue was resolved. The patience, technical expertise, and overall level of support I experienced from these two was exceptional and representative of what you would expect to see displayed as part of our ITS values. Thank you, Matt and Brad, for sticking by my side and saving the day!

-Whitney Sublett

Emmanuel Pajibo

Emmanuel has been an earnest learner, discussing Linux and other engineering topics with me over his time as an intern with ITSO. This past week, I was running into a particularly difficult installation problem with some of our RHEL servers. As I was setting up at our ping-pong table to continue working the problem, Emmanuel asked me if I could talk him through what I was up to at the moment (as he often does when time permits).

As I was talking about the problems I was having (failed media checks for USB drives, installation failures, etc.) and the steps I was taking to diagnose the problem, he asked for clarification on certain things. I didn’t know that he was actually searching the internet for solutions to my issues. One of them, a flaw in how Windows handles auto-mounting USB drives, was actually a well-known defect when imaging Linux installer ISOs to a flash drive – once completed, a Windows machine with AutoPlay enabled will re-mount a newly imaged drive and write a file that causes the media check to fail.

I was at a loss as to how to resolve the problem I was having, and Emmanuel dutifully found the proper fix in about 10 minutes.

-Michael Richardson

Sabastian Kwantreng

Sabastian’s help and enthusiasm in helping us welcome new Patriots and their families to GMU at Orientation was much appreciated. He was great in communicating the offerings that Information Technology Services provides, as well as information on who to contact with any issues.

-Noor Aarohi

Alex Galantis

Working with Alex is a pleasure. He always takes the time to help or promptly answer any questions or will point me to the available resources.
Recently, during the decommissioning of MESA, I had to move a large volume of excel reconciliation folders and files away from MESA to Teams and needed to complete the task quickly. I had questions about navigation in the new storage location since it was uncharted territory. Alex was knowledgeable on the details and even offered to assist with the relocation of the files. He did it like a pro! I so appreciate it and would like to recognize his ready assistance. Thank you, Alex!

-Kate Rodrigues

Joung Huh

Joung always documents everything so well. Recently, there was an issue with a system/process that I had never had to correct before. Joung’s documentation of a time when she had to correct a similar issue was so good that I didn’t even need to reach out for her assistance. I very much appreciate that she always stays on top of documenting and makes such clear documentation. It helps our entire team run smoothly & efficiently.

-Amanda Kennedy

Elizabeth Redwine

I am an adjunct faculty coming in after an absence of 1+ years.

Over the past few days, I have been calling the Helpdesk for all kinds of support to set me up for my course.

I am excited and happy to let you know that I received exceptional service from Elizabeth every time she happened to take my call. Although I am an IT faculty, I am challenged with Microsoft technology and Blackboard!! This is really a 5-star, or “white glove” experience that has been extremely pleasant and productive.

Cheers to Elizabeth for her patience, great attitude, and resourcefulness with a wide variety of topics – Zoom, Blackboard, Office 365 – you name it! Such employees are exemplary and so this is just a small notice of appreciation.

Thanks to Elizabeth as well as others who have made my experience memorable.

-Prof. Chandra Sekaran

Nico Clemente

We are dealing with aging hardware, and Nico has made himself available every week, for two months now, to swap out old hard disk drives. This effort is important to keep our storage running and his participation is critical. He often steps up within our team to take on new tasks and roles and he is very much appreciated for his willingness to do so.

-Sandy Winter

Toni Mehrman

“The Best Co-Worker!” Toni ALWAYS Goes out of her way to accommodate everyone, including me! I was waiting on three pending, new purchase orders and she was getting ready to go on vacation. She was able to contact purchasing to expedite the POs, working late the night before she had an early a.m. flight to get the Purchase Orders completed and back to me. She did not have to do this, but it was so appreciated. Toni is always dedicated to helping and assisting everyone in our ITS department family.

-Tamika Wilks

Tommy Dang, Emilio Goncalves, Stephanie Klare, Kate Orf, and Sean Wilder

A HUGE shout-out to this team for getting the VPN and Wi-Fi back up quickly on the first day of class! Their work is critical to Mason’s infrastructure and is most appreciated!

Thank you to those involved in letting us know early so we could plan around the authentication issue, and to everyone involved, including the Support Center, for getting the message out so fast!

Again, everyone, thank you for all you do so well! We are ONE ITS!

-Christina Crockett

Brian Davidson and Elizabeth Redwine

Recently, Elizabeth noticed a pattern of people not having the option to sign up for 2FA. She identified that those impacted were all active in Banner and their full access NetID/accounts had been created the day before, so she connected with the 2FA team to investigate. Brian researched and identified the problem and swiftly remediated it. This quick action avoided other new users from having problems with activating their account. Great teamwork!!

-Teresa Gibbons

Devin Bist, Tommy Dang, Brian Davidson, Peter Duong, David Lutz, Adrise Nazir, Lori Polnow, Alex Saleh, Larry Song, Tian Wang, and Sandy Winter

I’m sitting on a call with everyone mentioned above, listening to them debug an issue where users in the Engineering Building are not consistently able to reach PatriotWeb. Everyone is engaged, respectful, thinking inside, outside, beside, under, and over the box to try to determine the issues. With every new idea, Larry is asking the team to confirm it’s the correct next step and ensuring no one has concerns. When a concern was raised, the team assessed it before moving forward. Debugging sessions are long, sometimes boring, and always a little frustrating, but the actions of these team members and their professionalism to figure out the impossible was simply amazing. Larry’s leadership throughout the call was on point. I applaud this team!!

-Erica McQuiston

Kate Astor

Kate did an outstanding job presenting MicroStrategy Employee and Vacancy Training to a large audience during two separate sessions. She covered a number of complex topics and presented the information in a clear and concise manner.

– Brian Gantt

Ayo Ajiboye

I am an adjunct professor and I had an emergency on Monday that Ayo was able to help resolve. He was friendly, professional, and very competent. I’ve been in the ITS Support Center several times this semester, and the staff have always been super helpful. What made Ayo’s support very special is that I knocked on the door 5 minutes after closing – he let me in and resolved my issue so I could have a successful class session. He didn’t rush through the process and he took extra time to make sure I had what I needed.

Thank you to Ayo – you are a superstar!

-Anthony Arciero

Matt Berlejung

Matt is always stepping up to help. I have seen it both in projects he is working on and day to day operations. In the MESA migration project, he has been an excellent partner to colleagues both inside and outside of the project team. He makes those reaching out for extra help feel comfortable and ensures they leave with the necessary knowledge to continue working successfully on their own – whether it’s Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint, or MyHub. Thank you, Matt, for constantly being a great team player!

-Lauren Hutt

Tia Saah

Tia is the ultimate teammate! I was tasked with creating a presentation under a tight deadline, and Tia jumped in immediately to help get content together and the ideas flowing with minimal direction from me. I couldn’t have done it without her and am so grateful to have her on my team. Thank you, Tia, for being an ITS rockstar!

-Anna Stackhouse

Debbie Penny

Debbie worked with me to reestablish my account which was locked. We ran into many roadblocks in this process due to new security measures and policies. Debbie has the knowledge and familiarity of where to go and who to reach out to in order to acquire the necessary information within the ITS departments. She always takes on the responsibility of completing the task at hand with integrity and respect. ITS Support has been well represented by her tenacity and pleasant disposition in solving unconventional issues.

-Anthony Wilson

Nico Clemente

Nico has done a tremendous job with the rollout of Patriot Drive (P:Drive) as part of the MESA to M365 project. He is always so quick to respond to the needs of customers or teammates, and he does so in a thoughtful way. There was a lot to learn and a lot of work to coordinate migrations and setup to ensure that everything went smoothly. Nico has been up to every challenge. Thank you, Nico, for your commitment to this project!

-Lauren Hutt

Stephen Tate

I Want to take the time out to “THANK (YOU)” Stephen for always assisting and teaching. We are always taking Telecom Coordinator requests to update and/or change department billing orgs. Recently, we needed to find and enter a long list of about 120 missing billing org accounting details. Stephen assisted me and helped to set up a super quick Excel import for Pinnacle. This import saved me so much time, and at the same time, I learned the steps of how to execute it. Stephen always makes time to help me out, and thoroughly explains the processes for everything we work on. I appreciate the valuable sessions we have working through Pinnacle issues.

Stephen is an asset to the Telecom team, and he always goes out of his way to help everyone. Communication and teamwork are a huge part of what makes our Telecom group so successful!

– Tamika Wilks

Ayo Ajiboye

Thank you so much for your great support with my IT issues! Your knowledgeable, very pleasant, and professional approach in resolving my issues went a long way. I am now able to access my GMU emails and Blackboard on my phone because of how you went above and beyond to make sure everything worked well before our call ended!

– Milly Saldana

Lauren Reese

Lauren is always super helpful, fast, and accurate (all with a smile!). Never have I been let down by Lauren or the team she leads. Thanks, Lauren!

– Matthew Berlejung

Ryan LeBreton, Jan Macario, Kate Orf

The Web Applications & Services team always helps resolve issues super-fast! In the process, I always learn something new. I can always depend on them to help me in a pinch. Thanks for all you do so well!

– Christina Crockett

Michael Kramer

I want to thank Michael Kramer for helping me with our migration to Windows 11. I had migrated all but one computer in the Communications department that didn’t have sufficient space for the migration. Michael showed me where we could free up space on the computer.

All of the computers in Communications are shared computers. While dispatchers are the primary users, we often have other personnel logging on to our computers. We had users on the computers that resigned years ago! I placed the computers on an update schedule, but I didn’t know we also had to delete users. I will now make sure to delete users along with the updates.

After deleting the users, emptying the recycling bin and cleaning the disks on each computer, I was able to get the messy computer that would not migrate to Windows 11 to accept the application. I also went to their other 6 computers and repeated the process of deleting users and cleaning disks.

Michael, thank you for your help!

– Beverley Jackson

Yu Kuo

Yu Kuo (Yuko) is an exceptional leader. She actively participates in available trainings, including the recent Gallup Engagement Survey training for which she then created a related meeting structure and templates to help track progress. Yuko gets into the trenches with her team, never leaving them to resolve challenges on their own, and fully understands the team’s workload to help strategize a plan forward. Yuko is an outstanding communicator, team player, and is always working to better herself and the ITS department!!

– Chris Nayeri

Alex Saleh

A TDX ticket had been submitted that required a new route get added to the ITSO scanner VLAN, which is a critical part of allowing ITSO to detect vulnerabilities. I messaged Alex to see if he could take a look at the ticket for me, and he didn’t hesitate to look and created a solution for me, completing the ticket in no time.

– Brendan Nary

Jeff Kling

Events in Merten Hall tend to be high-profile and high-pressure – failure is not an option. On the occasions we have requested professional help from our colleagues in CaLT, without exception, Jeff responds quickly, resolves issues professionally and always with a smile on his face and a positive attitude. We don’t say thank you enough, Jeff. We want you to know how appreciated you are. Thank you for all you do to make ITS shine!

– Susan Kehoe