Who We Are
Software Training for Students is a free student-to-student technology training program for all undergraduate and graduate students at UW-Madison. We are a part of DoIT Academic Technology.
We’re here to help you get comfortable with the technology tools that will enable you to succeed during your time at UW-Madison student and beyond.
All of our services are free for all students at UW-Madison!
Our Mission
What is the purpose of STS?
To further develop technological literacy of all UW-Madison students interested in improving their software and programming skills towards academic and personal projects. Our goal is to get students from Nothing to Something – giving them a baseline of proficiency to continue additional learning on their own.
Won’t AI be doing all this for us anyway?
Even in an AI world, students will still need help learning the basics to any software or programming language – and they shouldn’t have to learn it alone. We believe that some of the best resources students have in a college setting come directly from the lived experiences of their peers. Our student staff not only have the topic knowledge, they have the lived student experience that can help communicate the most effective parts of a topic into the context of a course setting.
Our History
The earliest incarnation of Software Training for Students came to campus in 1993 as part of a general effort to help Badgers develop computer and internet skills.
In 1996, this effort was formally introduced as the Student Peer Trainers program, and was funded via the Student Information Technology Initiative (SITI)
Trainers and learners have brought skills gained through STS to positions at Microsoft, Amazon, Google, CitiBank, Qualcomm, and beyond.
The software and tech landscape has grown and evolved over our three-decade lifespan, but our mission has stayed the same: help students at UW-Madison become proficient in the tech tools that will help them succeed!