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Former NUSS student assistant Adam Guest, died of malaria in South America last Thursday. He was 23. Adam graduated in 1998 and worked for NUSS all four years of school. He was a kind, gentle, young man who will be deeply missed by all of us. You may remember Adam from his visits to departmental PCs throughout the library. You could see his handiwork every time you visited NUSSweb.
In lieu of flowers, Adam's family asked that donations be made to the School of Music choral groups. A librarywide collection was sent to the School of Music.
The following article is reprinted from a 1995 issue of NUL Computing News. This excerpt by Vince McCoy was part of a larger article written by Adam profiling IT division staff. Adam took photographs of each staff member, including this one of himself.
Profile Written by Vince McCoy
6/11/95
![[Photo of Adam Guest]](/it/litss/adam/guest.gif)
Last fall Adam Guest set out on a
journey, both geographic and personal, from the "Green Mountain State"
to the "Land of Lincoln" to begin his college career at NU's Medill
School of Journalism. Adam, who is a work/study student in the Information
Technology Division, had never been to the midwest before and found
he had some adjusting to do. First there was the flatness of Illinois
after living all his life amidst the green mountains of Vermont.
But probably even more of a shock to Adam was the bureaucracy he encountered
at NU. While bureaucracy is a fact of life at a major university such
as NU, Adam had not experienced it up to now. His elementary school
had an average class size of ten students and his high school had a
total of 800 students. As a freshman at NU Adam was suddenly taking
lecture classes with over 600 people in a single class. Everything at
NU seemed to involve standing in lines and filling out forms that often
asked a lot of personal questions. For the first time in his life Adam
felt like a faceless number in a sea of other undergraduates.
In high school Adam displayed a talent for math but the idea of studying mathematics in preparation for a career in the field did not appeal to him. Adam describes math as a solitary and rather cold field of study. While he appreciates the analytical skills he learned from studying math, Adam wanted to do something that provided more contact with other people. Journalism came to Adam "by the process of elimination" rather than as something he has always wanted to do.
Adam has been around the printing business all his life since his father owns a small printing company. During high school Adam worked for a local newspaper writing classified ads. This job gave him experience working with an IBM PC. Working in his Dad's printing shop provided him with Macintosh experience. These early work experiences gave Adam the computer skills the IT division was seeking in a work/study student.
Adam describes his job in the IT division as "the best work/study job that I know of." He added, "the hours are flexible and I am independently motivated in the work I do with plenty of opportunity to explore and learn new things." He sees his job as being "work/study in its truest sense -- work and study." Adam enjoys being a part of the division and seeing from the ground up how a network is managed and built and how technology is adapted to accomplish real everyday tasks.
Adam's duties in the IT division are divided between the Network Systems and Support department and the User Support Services department. As part of his duties in Network Systems and Support, he unpacks, assembles and configures new IBM PCs. This involves installing memory chips, LAN boards, and network software. Once the PC has been fully assembled Adam attaches it to the LAN and tests it.
For the User Support Services department, Adam has become something of an expert in HTML tagging. Adams tags nearly all of the department's training handouts and documentation. As administrator of the department's WWW server Adam loads the documents he and other department members have tagged onto the server. Adam also performs other maintenance tasks on the WWW server, e.g. a recent reorganization of the files on the server into separate directories according to their subject. Adam has created a personal home page which is currently loaded on the department server.
This series of profiles of the IT staff for NUL Computing News was written by Adam (excluding his own profile) as one of his projects for the User Support Services department. Adam, who also works as a staff photographer and reporter for the Daily Northwestern, conducted the interviews with IT staff, took the photos for each profile using his own camera, and developed the film himself. Adam created the electronic versions of the photos that appear in these profiles by scanning his conventional black & white negatives on a special scanner that can convert and save the photos as JPEG images.
Adam owns a Macintosh computer which he uses to write papers, but it is not connected to ResNET, the computer network made available for the first time this year in NU's student residences. Adam has an older Mac that would require a $300 network board to get connected to ResNET. Having access to the equipment in the ITC has been a great help to Adam's academic work because it keeps him current with technology and the computer resources available on campus. He has been able to help other students in his dorm, The Jones Fine and Performing Arts Residential College, get attached to campus servers and obtain files -- all skills he learned on the job at NUL.
When asked if writing the profiles for this article were helpful to his training in journalism Adam replied "absolutely". Students in Medill take very few journalism classes during their first year. Writing this article gave Adam experience in writing something other than "academic papers that are designed to show what I know".
Adam will return to his job in the IT division next year saying he "lucked out" in getting a job he enjoys. I think both Adam and the IT division lucked out.
