The School of Information kicked off the 2010–11 academic year by welcoming 42 new students to South Hall.
The three new doctoral students and 39 new MIMS students arrived on campus on Wednesday, August 25, for a day-long orientation, before beginning classes on Thursday.
The majority of the new master's students are returning to school from the working world, with an average of six years of experience in information-related fields. One-third are international students, from countries such as Chile, China, Germany, India, Iran, Korea, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, and Spain.
The students' accomplishments before joining the I School are wide-ranging and varied.
Some came to the I School from tech companies like Google (a search quality strategist), Yahoo! (a search editor), Microsoft (mobile advertising and content coordination), and Electronic Arts.
Others have worked for organizations as varied as the National Parks Conservation Association, the Ultimate Players Association, the NPR radio show "A Prairie Home Companion", and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
They have built solar cars and robots, led an Engineers Without Borders team to provide wastewater treatment in rural El Salvador, digitized the archive of the Brown Daily Herald newspaper, and supported research on the International Space Station.
One new student has been a graphic designer for companies like Comcast, UnitedHealthcare, Pacific Gas & Electric, and Scharffen Berger chocolate; another returns to the I School from Germany after previously spending a semester here as a visiting student researcher. Another student has worked on ICT and development with the Peace Corps and USAID in Haiti, Liberia, Kenya, the Dominican Republic, and Serbia.
One new MIMS student managed the content for New York City's cutting-edge 311 call center and website; another writes an open-source programming blog with 100,000 readers each month; another is a Rubik's cube "speedcubing" hobbyist.
The I School also welcomes three new doctoral students this year.
R. Stuart Geiger studies knowledge production in decentralized or distributed organizations, including scientific research networks and user-generated content communities. He recently completed a master's degree in communication, culture, and technology at Georgetown University. Stuart is currently studying geographically-distributed ecological scientists, and much of his past research has focused on the social and technological governance of Wikipedia. Critiquing the conventional view of the user-edited encyclopedia as a near-anarchistic battleground of truth, his master's thesis showed how Wikipedia's software infrastructure invisibly facilitates peer review, quality standardization, exclusion mechanisms, author and reviewer credentials, normative shaming, and formal governance.
Meena Natarajan is an interaction design researcher and social entrepreneur who is interested in the design and impact of collaborative mobile and Internet technologies for civic engagement in developing regions. She has two master's degrees: an M.S. in design and environmental analysis from Cornell University and an M.Sc. in human resource development psychology from the University of Madras, India. Throughout her academic career, she has been struck by how research in these fields often fails to reach the populations most affected by its implications. She plans to work with the I School's Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD) research community to develop accessible tools, informed by local values and knowledge, that help communities mobilize and leverage their collective intelligence to solve issues of development that concern them.
Galen Panger’s research interests center on the information challenges of democracy. He comes to the I School from Google’s Washington, D.C. office, where he managed Google’s political advertising communications and launched the company’s first-ever fifty-state economic impact report. Galen’s work with the late Jef Raskin, inventor of the Macintosh computer, taught him that the design of technology can be a matter of ethics. After majoring in public policy at Stanford and working for Google, Galen says he wants to bring Jef’s perspective to his research and take a hard look at the ways in which new information technologies and organizations can enhance — or undermine — democratic participation.