The School of Information kicked off the 2012–2013 academic year by welcoming 60 new students to South Hall — the largest entering class in the School’s fifteen-year history.
The three new doctoral students and 57 new MIMS students arrived on campus on Wednesday, August 22, for a day-long orientation, before beginning classes on Thursday.
The new students hail from eleven countries and five continents. The majority of the new master’s students are returning to school from the working world, with an average of six years of information-related experience in fields like health care, media, consulting, financial services, telecommunications, banking, advertising, government, technology, music and recording, and education.
The students’ accomplishments before joining the I School are wide-ranging and varied, with jobs like graphic designers, web analysts, technical writers, engineers, consultants, web developers, mobile developers, interaction designers, usability specialists, and product managers.
Their résumés include entries like:
- Director of marketing and new media for a Nashville-based record label
- Freelance reporter
- Software engineer (and third employee) at Eventbrite, responsible for software that handles $1M in transactions daily
- Business technology analyst, Deloitte Consulting
- Park ranger for technology, managing mobile technology, social networking, and augmented and virtual reality for the National Park Service
- Engineer and team leader, Tata Consultancy
- Senior director of an online advertising company
- Business development manager of microfinance institution in Tanzania
- Information systems manager for the Japanese government’s Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry
The I School also welcomes three new doctoral students this year:
Sarah Van Wart returns to the School of Information after completing her MIMS degree in 2010. Her MIMS final project, Local Ground, developed a platform for collecting and sharing user-generated geospatial information. She hopes to build on this work by studying how tools and processes might empower marginalized communities and young people of color to become not just information consumers, but also information producers, analysts, re-mixers, and entrepreneurs.
Ishita Ghosh has studied the use of mobile technology for banking and finance in both India and Uganda. She is interested in the development of technologies and systems for financial inclusion — providing access to banking and financial services to previously unbanked people in the developing world.
Seongtaek Lim is interested in both social computing and entertainment computing. He has degrees in cognitive science and computer science, and is interested in studying users’ experiences and connections in multi-modal communication and in the rich media environments that are becoming possible with new high-bandwidth and mobile connectivity.