In recognition of his outstanding contributions to WashU IT and the university community, Josh Kelahan, a Systems Engineer III for Enterprise Applications since 2019, was nominated as a 2023 Person of ImpacT. He won a drawing held by WashU IT for all the nominees at the January IT All Hands meeting and got to choose his own experience as a reward.
Josh chose to treat his colleagues to a thrilling visit to Escape Room St. Louis. The team-building event provided a fun opportunity to strengthen team bonds with an engaging in-person activity. The team successfully escaped the room with six minutes to spare and then celebrated their achievement with a meal at The Blue Duck restaurant in Maplewood.
Josh emphasizes the importance of teamwork in his success. “Without my team there is no way I could have achieved this award. All my projects are with my team and whatever department we are working with. They are the people that I interact with the most. It was even a member of my team that nominated me for this award,” he said.
Still acknowledging his team, Josh added, “While there are specific team members I’d like to recognize, some are very private individuals who don’t like their names being out there, so instead, I am just going to say to all of them: you know who you are, and you should continue being awesome.”
Josh is currently spearheading two projects: migrating the WUSM student registrar documents to the KnowledgeLake platform and retiring the ADIS system due to the implementation of ARCH, a new system record for University Advancement. “Josh is always looking for improvements in the applications we are migrating,” said the colleague who nominated him for the Person of ImpacT award. In the near future, Josh will work on migrating files for the WUSM Anesthesiology group and engage in a large-scale project to move Pediatrics information from their servers to the WUIT servers.
When asked about key lessons he would like to share with others, Josh remarked, “I learned in past positions that when opportunities come up you need to jump on things right away, even if it’s a volunteer thing. You can stay in your comfort zone, but you will eventually find that you will get overlooked for things because no one will know who you are. Instead, you should dive head first into everything. You can always scale back on things later. That allows you to get to know everyone very quickly and that can only help you out later on.”