Congratulations to Angel Ortiz for winning Notre Dame's Community Service Student Employee of the Year Award! This year was the first that we’ve hired a student employee as a receptionist at the Robinson Community Learning Center, and it was immediately clear that we had made an excellent decision after Angel’s first week.
Angel works at our front desk on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, greeting students by name and with a smile as they get off the school bus to walk into the Robinson Center for our after-school program. He settled in and learned every student’s name quickly, which has helped him to quickly become a trusted adult for our students. He’s also gotten to know our students’ parents quite well, and has conversations with them while they wait for the children to make their way up to the lobby. He is such a great ambassador for the Robinson Center and makes everyone feel like they belong.
Many students at Notre Dame have had some type of receptionist job on campus, and often say the exact same thing: “It’s great because I get paid to do homework.” Angel treats his job as much more than a study hall; he views it as an opportunity to touch the lives of the Robinson Center’s students and families each and every day. His is often the first RCLC voice and smile someone hears when they give us a call and sees when they walk through our doors, and he has been an especially valuable member of our team as a fluent Spanish speaker who can talk to our Spanish-speaking families, or seamlessly translate for non-Spanish speaking staff when needed.
Angel is always eager to help in any way he can, from breaking down empty boxes to helping us sort databases, and he has exceeded our expectations in every way. It’s why, when we discovered that he had run out of Federal Work Study funding, we decided to pay his wages ourselves; because he’d become too valuable of a team member to replace. Angel is everything we hoped for in a receptionist, an amazing symbol of Notre Dame as a force for good in the community, and is unequivocally deserving to be named Student Employee of the Year!