Student Employee of the Year

April 21, 2010

Undergraduate Worker Named Student Employee of the Year

Stefanie Carter, a circulation supervisor at Emory University’s Woodruff Library and an undergraduate senior in the Emory College of Arts and Sciences, won the Emory University Student Employee of the Year award. Carter was chosen from a pool of 52 nominees across the university, said Jennifer Kostyrna, student employment director and assistant director of financial aid in Emory’s Office of Financial Aid, the department granting the award. Carter received a plaque and a $100 award, which she said jokingly she would use to pay off her library fines.

Carter is the only undergraduate student employee in the department to have been promoted to a supervisor position, usually reserved for graduate student employees. She began working for the library in summer 2006.

Carter was nominated by Tara McCurley, circulation program development coordinator at the University Libraries. “Stefanie’s sense of responsibility is extraordinarily strong, and she strives to excel no matter how mundane or complicated the task,” McCurley wrote in her nomination letter. She noted that Carter also goes well out of her way to help patrons, recently assisting a former Emory researcher living out-of-state who needed an article he had second-authored but could not remember the title or the name of the journal in which it appeared.

“Stefanie not only was able to find the article in our collection, but she also requested the needed journal volume out of storage, scanned the entire article, and emailed it to the extremely grateful patron – a project that lasted over several days,” McCurley wrote. “I have never seen Stefanie turn a patron away without doing her best to provide the assistance the patron seeks, making her sense of duty and dedication to customer service truly noteworthy.”

In addition to McCurley, Carter named three people in the circulation department important to her work experience in the Woodruff Library: Melanie Bunn, Lucas Church and Jessica Perlove. “This is the first job I’ve ever had. Everything I know how to do, I learned from them,” Carter says. But her work ethic comes from her family, as well as her sense of compassion and empathy. “You do what you can for other people because you’d want them to do it for you, because it’s the right thing to do,” Carter says.

Carter, a native of Grayson, near Lawrenceville, is a double major in English and women’s studies and recently completed her honors thesis on riot grrrl zines and the third wave of feminism. She will graduate in May.

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 The Emory University Libraries (http://web.library.emory.edu/) in Atlanta and Oxford, Ga., are an intellectual commons for Emory University, Atlanta and the world. The nine libraries’ holdings include more than 3.1 million print and electronic volumes, 40,000-plus electronic journals, and internationally renowned special collections.

Emory University (http://www.emory.edu) is known for its demanding academics, outstanding undergraduate experience, highly ranked professional schools and state-of-the-art research facilities. Perennially ranked as one of the country’s top 20 national universities by U.S. News & World Report, Emory encompasses nine academic divisions as well as the Carlos Museum, The Carter Center, the Yerkes National Primate Research Center and Emory Healthcare, Georgia’s largest and most comprehensive health care system.