School of Applied Technology Student Commencement Speaker Named

Congratulations to SAT Commencement Student Speaker, Sydney Hardwick

The School of Applied Technology at Illinois Institute of Technology is proud to announce Sydney Hardwick (ITM ’15) as our 2015 Commencement Student Speaker. Hardwick, an Information Technology and Management undergraduate student with a minor in Communications, was selected from numerous applicants. Hardwick said she thought it would be an excellent opportunity for her to share her perspective on the prestige of earning a degree from IIT and her experiences throughout the past four years of undergraduate education. She believes IIT provided her with a solid educational foundation, unique mentors, and a very talented, diverse network of friends and colleagues; and the most important thing she learned at IIT was to utilize and leverage the abundance of resources available to her and other students.

As a student worker in SAT, Hardwick served an important role in the migration of the old SAT website to the new. Due to her education and experience as a student worker, Hardwick earned an internship with Visa, Inc. in Austin, Texas after her junior year. This successful internship led to a job offer as a User Experience Analyst with Visa where she will work in their new Usability Lab and be responsible for analyzing how people interact with different technologies. Hardwick also served as the founding president of the Love to Dance Collective at IIT.

Prior to enrolling at IIT, Hardwick grew up in the Chatham and South Shore communities of Chicago before her family moved to Blue Island where she attended Queen of Peace High School in Burbank, Ill.