Each year, the president of the University of Texas at Austin selects a Student Employee of the Year out of a set of finalists nominated by faculty and high-level staff. This year, iSchool undergraduate Ishwari Garge reached the finalist stage. Although the top prize was eventually claimed by University Housing and Dining human resources student associate Sahithi Alla, we take this moment to salute Garge’s contributions to our school and her accomplishment in making finalist.
Garge works as an academic assistant for Associate Professor of Instruction Michael McQuaid, who says she is the most effective assistant he has ever worked with in his 18 years as a professor. “Her work is beyond top-notch,” Prof. McQuaid says. “I've had excellent assistants before, but they are usually great followers. Ishwari leads. She uses her imagination to envision what we can do in class and sometimes proposes solutions that I haven't considered.”
According to Prof. McQuaid, some of Garge’s most helpful attributes include her timeliness in communication, her approachability for students of all levels and her time management. “She doesn't wait to react but anticipates needs and reaches out to students and to the instructor at just the right time,” Prof. McQuaid says.
Garge’s contributions go beyond her presence in Prof. McQuaid’s classroom. After having assisted with his Prompt Engineering course for a semester, Ishwari took the initiative to create a complete lesson plan for future iterations of the course. This was a major contribution to the department's curriculum development efforts. Her work has since been used in improving the course and has led to better student outcomes, such as improved course evaluations in Fall 2025.
Garge also served as academic assistant for academic for Prof. John Neumann’s Accessible UX course. Neumann similarly found Garge to be an excellent communicator who was able to contribute to the course proactively. He points to a few examples: her ability to explain her grading strategy to students in a way that built trust, her contribution of new exercises for a hands-on accessibility tools workshop, and her voluntary dedication to time-consuming feedback and resubmission opportunities for students involving multiple rounds of grading.
Like McQuaid, he stresses that he always felt his students were in good hands with Garge. “Ishwari can think quickly on her feet and creatively,” Neumann says. “These are wonderful traits in a course assistant, or any type of teammate.”