$500 Prize is Awarded Annually to Students Who Use Technology to Improve Life at NYU
Every year, NYU IT presents the George Sadowsky Award, and in partnership with the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, the Max Goldstein Prize, to members of the NYU student body who have made important contributions to NYU’s computing- and internet-related services.
The Max Goldstein Prize is a $500 award presented to an undergraduate student who has improved the academic, cultural, or social life of the NYU Community through the creative and practical application of computing technology. This year, the award committee chose to honor Daniel Yoo, a rising senior majoring in computer science, as the 2019 Goldstein Prize winner.
The George Sadowsky Award offers $500 to an undergraduate or graduate student who exhibits exemplary innovation in using the internet for community service. The 2019 recipient of the George Sadowsky Award is Ryan Grippi, a graduate student in the Tisch School of the Arts’ Interactive Telecommunications Program and a staff member at the Kanbar Institute of Film and Television.
Max Goldstein Prize
Daniel Yoo was nominated for the Max Goldstein Prize by two of his colleagues at NYU’s College of Arts and Sciences Information Systems—Bruce Padron, an IT Support Specialist; and Cary Chan, the Assistant Director of Information Systems. They singled Yoo out for his role in building and directing the team responsible for creating the Prehealth Committee Letter Application, as well as for managing the College Cohort and Transfer Student portals.
The prehealth committee letter is a crucial aspect of the application process for NYU students interested in attending graduate school in medical fields. When difficulties arose with the previous service, the Information Systems team was faced with the task of building a new portal from the ground up or risk interrupting the application process of over 250 students.
“Daniel actually stepped up and said, ‘yeah, that’s possible, I believe we can do this,’” Chan recalls. “This is the type of thing that would normally get built out in about six months to a year, and they basically did it in a month and a half,” added Padron. “When you think about it, it’s almost an impossible feat.”
With this award, Yoo is following in the footsteps of Max Goldstein, a figure instrumental in putting NYU on the map in the world of computing. Starting at NYU in the 1950s, Goldstein began as the director of the Department of Energy’s Computer Center and went on to co-found the Department of Computer Science before becoming the first director of the Academic Computing Facility, the forerunner of today’s NYU IT.
George Sadowsky Award
Sadowsky Award winner Ryan Grippi, a Tisch Film and TV alumnus, understands first-hand some of the administrative difficulties film students face trying to get a project approved. “You’re an art student but you still have to play with the machine of the bureaucracy that the school makes you do to get these projects approved,” he explains.
“Think of the production as a giant camping trip. Or a military operation,” jokes Christina DeHaven-Call, the Associate Chair of Production for Undergraduate Film and TV and Grippi’s nominator. “What Ryan has been doing, on his own time, is thinking, ‘how can we automate this?’”
Working with Google Apps Scripts, Grippi was able to create a system wherein students interested in pursuing a project would fill out a Google Form, hit “submit,” and have the system do much of the back end work for them. When it’s implemented, the program will also be able to index the projects, making them visible to students who might be interested in working on them, and connecting them with the project’s originators.
This is very much in the spirit of George Sadowsky, another significant figure in NYU’s computing history. Beyond acting as Director of Network Services in the Academic Computing Facility at NYU, Sadowsky played a role in deploying Information and Communications Technology to over 50 developing countries, an effort that led to his 2013 induction into the Internet Hall of Fame.
Nominations for 2020
Nominations for the 2020 Max Goldstein Prize and George Sadowsky Award will open near the beginning of the spring 2020 semester. Keep an eye on future issues of Connect for an announcement when the nomination process opens.