Mark Stokosa is the Manager for Education Analytics' (EA) Information Technology (IT) team, and he joined EA in 2023. Mark is from Stevens Point, Wisconsin, and attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

How would you describe your role on the Information Technology (IT Team)?  

I am the Manager for the IT team at EA. I primarily oversee day-to-day operations for the IT Help Desk, but I am also responsible for ensuring all of IT is working well for EA, and I participate in IT leadership with Justin Lewis and Lalanthika Vasudevan

 

What interested you in working at EA?  

More than anything else, EA’s mission brought me on board here. I had been working as a Linux and Unix Systems Administrator for more than twenty years for several different companies. Something they all had in common for me was that I was so distant from what those companies did as a service or product for their customers that I never really became invested in the overall companies’ success beyond doing well for myself and for my immediate team. 

Here, EA’s mission is never far from my mind. I come from many teachers, administrators, and supporters of education in my extended family, and I have often reflected that, if I hadn’t chosen IT as a career, I would be in education. Still, I have been able to scratch that itch over the years through tutoring students and by volunteering as youth leadership for my children’s clubs. 

We know that every day is different, but what would a typical day at EA look like for you?  

A typical day for me starts with me docking my laptop and powering it up. Please note: this means I power it down at the end of every workday, which I highly recommend to everyone. I get up to speed on any Slack messages or emails that have accumulated, and then I open my To Do list in Monday.com and the IT Help Desk ticket queue to see what my immediate priorities for the day need to be. 

I’d estimate that about one-third to one-half of my days are usually spent in meetings, keeping things running smoothly for the IT Help Desk, facilitating discussions for the IT Systems Administrators, and planning for the team with the IT Team Leads. The rest of my day is usually spent chasing down escalations and anything else that the IT Help Desk and Systems Administrators need help with. Once each month, I get two workdays for the price of one when we do our after-hours IT maintenance. 

 

What skills do you possess that you find helpful in your role?  

I have found the most success as a new Manager at EA where I can leverage the organizational and more process-oriented skills I have built over my entire career. Doing well at my job means tracking many, many different priorities, and the better tools I can build around myself to support communication and implementation of tasks, the better I get at completing those many, many priorities. 

Communication has always come easily to me, so making sure I ask the right questions and record and route the right details from that communication is a strength of mine. 

Looking at the big picture, I like technology. Outside of work, I have a great time with electronics projects and messing around with my home cluster, so it’s not difficult at all to bring that same joy and energy for tinkering to EA. 

 

What is the most rewarding aspect of your role? 

The most rewarding aspect of my role at EA is first, last, and always helping people.  I have always been more comfortable serving others than being served, and that translates directly to providing quality customer support here. IT worries about the nonsense technology brings, so everyone else here can focus more on what they do for EA. I’m surrounded by great people, both inside and outside of the IT team, so doing a good job professionally aligns perfectly with helping folks I genuinely care about. 

What is your favorite project that you’ve worked on at EA?  

My favorite project at EA has been championing and rolling out the Confluence Knowledge Base for IT. We have built a culture on our team of documenting our processes, and with every new article we post, either to our internal IT or EA-facing spaces, we make it easier for those around us to immediately access the information they need. This has the follow-on effect of reducing the IT Help Desk workload when we successfully connect someone with the right Knowledge Base article before they even submit a help desk ticket. 

 

If you had to choose a different team to work on at EA, which team would you pick and why?  

In the five years it took me to complete a Computer Science undergraduate degree, the most important thing I learned was that I am not a software developer, so I’d steer well clear of that. I’d probably find the most success in another support role, either on a different General & Administrative (G&A) team or somewhere involving customer-facing support. 

 

What changes do you anticipate in your field in the next year?  

AI tools are already bringing surprising changes to IT in areas that have held still as long as I have been in this career. These tools are still very, very young, and to this point almost always bring more trouble than they are worth, but I anticipate that to start changing very rapidly. I’ve long joked—but mostly seriously—about being in this line of work, because our inevitable robot overlords will still need doctors, but AI tools are already starting to make existing workloads more efficient for those with the patience to suffer the early growing pains of this technology. 

 

What is something you enjoy in your free time?  

The short answer to this is “building stuff.” I love to create, design, build, imagine, and just generally turn the noise inside my head into something tangible in the world. It doesn’t have to be useful, to be sure! Tinkering with electronics, designing things for my 3D printer, daydreaming about big “someday” projects, and sometimes just building LEGO sets are ways that I like to exercise my brain.  

A small microcontroller dev board that Mark taught to tell analog time, with a smooth sweeping second hand. This served as practice for a similar microcontroller in a DIY smartwatch form factor that Mark hopes to work on this summer.
Someday, Mark hopes to build his own cabin on a chunk of heavily wooded land big enough that the loudest thing Mark has to deal with is himself. Mark used a WikiHouse style design to create this model, where load bearing framing is built into the individual triangles. He is mostly just daydreaming in SketchUp at this point, but he is learning more about building codes to make the daydreaming as detailed as he can.

When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?  

I wanted to design vehicles. I was obsessed with the shapes of cars, airplanes, spaceships (real or imagined), bicycles, boats, motorcycles, etc. What made them look the way they did, and why did I like the looks of some but not others? It wasn’t a purely academic pursuit; I was just as interested in the art and aesthetics of these forms. Three semesters into trying for a degree in Mechanical Engineering, I knew that I’d be happier just playing with 3D modeling software as a hobby than as a career, so I switched to Computer Science, and I still play with these shapes today. 

 

What is something that you would tell your younger self about your career? 

For the love of all that is good and sane, never start with a goal and work backwards. Start with curiosity and follow that where it leads you. Enjoy the experience of what you do, because that is your life, right now, here, today. It’s fine to make plans for later, but those plans will change because of things both within and outside of your control. Your life isn’t on the other side of your plan, so make it something you enjoy right now. 

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