Alumni and board game enthusiasts Kaity Bequette (MS '14) and Tom Ackerman (MS '13) put the knowledge they gained from the iSchool's community- and design-centric courses into game design, first as game developers and later as volunteers for CUDO Plays.
User experience expert Andrea Gannon (MS ’15) spends most days using her skills to improve payroll processes. She is a senior associate product manager at Workday, a California-based human capital management company.
The systems Scott Migaldi helps to create at T-Mobile facilitate human interaction and information sharing across the globe. To accomplish this he uses skills acquired at the iSchool—he conducts research into information-seeking behavior, evaluates user needs, and determines how information-sharing systems can meet those needs.
Community services librarian Ziba Perez Zehdar (MS ’12) is going mobile with the Long Beach Public Library (LBPL), and we’re not talking about a digital app. She leads several community engagement projects at multiple branch libraries and outside the library.
Most academic librarians stepping into a position can model their work on that of their predecessors. But not Thomas Padilla (MS '14). On his appointment in April as the first humanities data curator at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) Library (and the first in the entire University of California system), Padilla has had to draw on a number of different disciplines to shape his role of working with data throughout its life cycle.
Tina Hubert (MS '88), director of the Six Mile Regional Library District located in Granite City, Illinois, is the 2016 recipient of the Illinois Library Association Librarian of the Year Award. The award recognizes a librarian's distinguished service and leadership in Illinois libraries. The award is sponsored by Sikich.
The company culture at Spotify is just one of the reasons knowledge manager Colleen McClowry loves working there. She encourages students to seek out job opportunities that align with their own personal interests, whether it be music or any other passion.
Alumna Melissa Cragin (PhD '09) has been named executive director of Midwest Big Data Hub (MBDH). MBDH is a network of regional institutions created to facilitate collection, management, and use of complex information, creating active partnerships of experts and resources to address issues relevant to life in the Midwest.
Corey Schumacher's work as a research specialist supports a global firm's management consulting teams across North America. She credits the iSchool's courses with exposing her to the many possible career tracks open to graduates, including her current role.
Alumna Michèle V. Cloonan (MS '84, PhD '88) has received the Preservation Publication Award for the book she edited, Preserving our Heritage: Perspectives from Antiquity to the Digital Age. The award is given by the Society of American Archivists (SAA) in recognition of the author or editor of an outstanding published work related to archives preservation.
