Behind the Scenes of Behind the Screens
Karlyn Jakusz is a jack of all trades when it comes to her numerous roles within Information Technology at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. With the pace of technology’s evolution over her 26 years of service, she has been involved with countless transitions and switchovers from one technology to another, playing an active role in ensuring the success of each change.
“I’ve always said if there is a way to break it, there is a way to fix it,” said Jakusz.
Jakusz is the winner of the 2025 Carolyn Rolfson Sargis Award, recognizing employees with more than 25 years of service who work behind the scenes.
She started at UW-Stevens Point working in the telephone support office at the time when there were phones in every residence hall and academic building. Since then, Jakusz has inherited and merged many other positions into her own, where she now serves three independent roles, including Postmaster, IT Purchasing and Telephone Administration.
Her role consists of work on accounts, distribution lists and email support, hardware and software purchases and everything related to the university’s telephone system. However, her day-to-day is ever-changing as she never knows what problems may arise across campus.
“We have to put out the biggest fires first,” said Jakusz. “I might start off my day thinking I’m going to work on one thing. Then, suddenly a server goes down and we have to procure a solution quickly.”
When the days arise when everything seems to break all at once, Jakusz says the best approach is to start checking off the boxes and do what needs to be done.
“The best days in IT are when you get no calls at all and everybody ignores you because that means everything is working as it should be.”
One of the largest projects Jakusz worked on over the last year was the Teams Voice implementation. The migration to Teams Voice required a large devotion out of Jakusz when it comes to education of this change as the change impacted every single employee on campus. This reduced costs for the campus by $191,000 overall.
Jakusz credits the success of changes such as these to her coworkers and those around her. She says they are pushed hard in IT to utilize all their resources and find cheaper and more efficient ways of doing things.
“Luckily, the campus was in a really good place in that we had forward-thinking people years and years ago that put us in a spot that we could change easily and cheaper than a lot of other institutions,” she said.
Jakusz also wants everyone to know that the Information Technology office is here to help.
“People think that sometimes IT is out to make their lives difficult when we are trying to do just the opposite. Some of the things that people think are easy or should be easy fixes may not understand how it kind of filters down throughout every department.”
Jakusz’s hope for the future of her department is to leave it better than she found it for the next person in her position. She wants to have the campus set up for success for the next technology change, just how past employees did for her.
Chief Information Officer Peter Zuge said, “Karlyn has been an invaluable part of Information Technology not only in performing these roles, but also from offering practical solutions and having a ‘we can do it’ attitude to the many problems that arise across the campus.”