The Grad School Chronicles

I just got a call from Lisa Gray-Lion regarding the status of my University Library Associates application. I think I said “yes” before she even officially asked me to accept!

I’ll still have to fill out some paperwork, but I think it’s safe to announce this. The associates position pretty much relieves all the worries I had about getting financial support to go to grad school. I was looking at the University of Michigan entry on Wikipedia last night, and I learned that it’s the most expensive public school in the country for out of state students!

Because I don’t have to worry about finances anymore, I can safely say that I’ll be going to the University of Michigan in the Fall. I guess I should send in that letter, just to make it super official.

I’m seriously excited about this. Because I’m not a typical librarian student, my job description will be more experimental and fun. Hopefully I can come up with a lot of good ideas on how to enhance the library with emerging technologies and the paradigms behind them.

PS: I just ordered this.

I wrote about my visit to the University of Michigan School of Information Visiting Days on my personal blog yesterday and forgot to put a link to it.

You can read about my experience here.

Cliff Notes edition: I thought the program was nice, the people were incredible, and I feel very good about the program with only a few reservations that I can live with.

Okay, so this news is sorta late, but I figured I’d post this anyway. Remember how I wrote about how Georgia Tech wasn’t responding to my emails? I finally got a response! A rejection! Yeah, that’s right, Georgia Tech only takes the time to respond to a candidate when they’re rejecting them. How nice. Here’s the letter:

Dear Hung:

I’m sorry to inform you that your application to Georgia Tech’s MS program in Human-Computer Interaction has been declined.

There are many applicants we are not able to admit. The applicant pool was significantly larger than in recent years, and the overall quality of applicants even higher than usual.

If you would like advice on strengthening your application and trying again next year, I’ll be happy to help.

You have our best wishes.

At least they offered to give me advice on helping my application. I actually emailed them back immediately and got an “out of town” autoreply. So they wrote me this denial from out of town?

I’m not too upset about this. Georgia Tech showed that they didn’t care about their MS students even before sending me this rejection. I spoke with some other students at the University of Michigan visiting days and there was pretty much a consensus that Georgia Tech treats their MS students with dollar signs in their eyes.

I just got an email from Judith Olson about some changes in the specialization choices at The University of Michigan’s School of Information MSI program. Originally I had applied under the HCI (Human Computer Interaction) specialization because it was the closest thing to what I really wanted to study, Social Computing. I’m happy to see that Social Computing has its own specialization in the MSI program now!

This is really cool! When I was shopping around for grad schools, I found none that really specialized in Social Computing. Now that I’ve been accepted into Michigan, they added a Social Computing specialization. Nice!

I’m still waiting to see if I can get a job offer at Google, but this announcement adds a few weights on the scale of Michigan. I’m also waiting on the offer for that University Library Associates thing at Michigan. I have a feeling that deciding is going to be much tougher than waiting…

I’ll be sure to ask a ton of questions when I’m at the visiting days at Michigan on March 24-26.

Here’s the email; it also lists a few other specializations that are kinda cool:

We at the School of Information are excited to announce the addition of several new specializations to our Master of Science in Information program:

Social Computing
Information Policy
Community Informatics
Information Analysis and Retrieval
Preservation of Information
Incentive-Centered Design

As the information field matures as a professional discipline, areas of focus and career paths within the field are becoming more established. Our new specializations recognize some of these paths and are designed to help you more closely match your MSI experience to your career goals and the expanding job market for information professionals.

These six new tracks join our current specializations in archives and records management, human-computer interaction, and library and information services.

We’ve grown our specialization in information economics, management and policy (IEMP) into several distinct areas. Information policy will be its own specialization, and information economics will be a primary focus of the incentive-centered design specialization. Information management is an area so central to the skill set of an information professional that we have incorporated it as a core component of the entire MSI program.

Students who enter the MSI program in the fall of 2007 wishing to specialize in IEMP may still do so, or they may focus on one or two of the newer specializations.

Though these six are newly identified as specializations at SI, they are all areas in which we have been building expertise and curriculum for a number of years.

Two of the new specializations — information analysis and retrieval (IAR) and incentive-centered design — have matured from earlier academic clusters within the School. IAR focuses on how information is stored, searched, and analyzed in computer systems (the current darling in this realm is of course Google). Incentive-centered design develops systems that align users’ motivations with the organizations overall goals. It draws deeply from economics, psychology, and sociology, with computer science as a unifying thread.

The community informatics specialization recognizes the foresight of the School’s Community Information Corps, or CIC. Established in 2001, the CIC has led nationally in the development and professionalization of what’s now a widely recognized career track — the professional who deploys information and communication technologies in service of the public good.

Our specialization in social computing, the force driving Web 2.0, also develops from this focus on communities and information. It brings together our work and curriculum in the areas of social networking and user-contributed content systems. Social computing is a force so pervasive it led Time magazine to name “you” person of the year in 2006.

The preservation of information specialization grows from our unique strengths in archives and records management and responds to the urgent need for expertise in preservation, digital curation, and Web archiving within all information-rich organizations.

With the new specializations comes added flexibility. It’s now possible to complete your MSI with *two* specializations, and a number of courses can be counted for more than one specialization.

The evolution of these new specializations at SI marks the evolution of the information field as a whole and validates the trail SI has blazed over more than a decade of innovation as the School of Information.

Learn more about these expanded offerings at http://si.umich.edu/go.

The information field is our future, and our future is here. Join us!