Maine Perspective Front Page
Undergraduate Named Top Student Employee in Maine
UMaine Student Employees of the Year are Harold Hatch of Orono, a first-year graduate student in biochemistry, and Nikki Heathcote of Hudson, a first-year undergraduate in the School of Nursing. Heathcote also has been named the Maine Student Employee of the Year.
This is the second consecutive year that a UMaine undergrad was cited by the Northeast Association of Student Employment Administrators as the state's student employee of the year.
Heathcote and Hatch were among 51 top student employees nominated from across campus as the University community observed National Student Employment Appreciation Week, April 4-10. The week is designated to celebrate and recognize the value of student work and the student employment professional. This is the third year that UMaine's observance has been campuswide, coordinated by the Office of Student Employment.
Graduate Student Employee of the Year Harold Hatch, a student laboratory aide, began working part time in the research lab of Associate Professor of Biochemistry Dorothy Croall as an undergraduate in 1997. Today, Hatch's research in the lab is related to his master's thesis. Working with Croall, Hatch is cloning genes of protein fragments to develop a model of their little-known function. He has extensively documented his contributions to the successful cloning of mutant enzymes, the generation of new recombinant protein constructs, inducing their expression, and the difficult task of working out purification strategies. By predicting how such proteins interact and change shape under different conditions, researchers could design drugs to help prevent over-expression and tissue destruction associated with such conditions as heart attack and Alzheimer's Disease.
Maine and UMaine Student Employee of the Year Nikki Heathcote has been working for the past year as a student administrative assistant in the Department of Military Science. Her responsibilities in the Department's main office range from coordinating a mass mailing to sending an ROTC fact sheet to a high school student. She took the initiative and extra effort to establish the first-ever prospect management Standard Operating Procedure (SOP), detailing the different classifications of students interested in the ROTC Program. Heathcote also developed standard mailing packages for each classification, a system that allows information requests to be processed in a two-day turnaround. In addition, she developed a six-page color brochure describing the Army ROTC programs.
The improved marketing effort is credited with the recent growth in the ROTC program, where enrollment has grown from 62 participating students last school year to 77 this spring.
Heathcote attributes much of her success as a student employee to maintaining a good working relationship with her supervisor, Maj. Michael Ferrone.
Heathcote is the third generation to attend the University following in her mother's (Class of '77) and her grandfather's (Class of '59) footsteps.