In this feature, BS/IS student Jose Ramos discusses his practicum experience at JPMorgan Chase.

BS/IS student David Alegre discusses his summer internship with PepsiCo. After graduating, he hopes to earn a master's degree in user experience design and work for a company like PepsiCo.

Cassidy Russell wears many hats—theater director, improv teacher, visual artist, and MS/LIS online (Leep) student. However, she still finds time to be involved in service activities. Russell recently joined Students Advising on Graduate Education (SAGE), a student advisory board and leadership opportunity for graduate students at Illinois that fosters active engagement with Graduate College programs and initiatives.

The iSchool at Illinois will host the 2021 ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL), which will be held virtually from September 27-30. JCDL is a major international forum focusing on digital libraries and associated technical, practical, and social issues. The conference will feature paper and poster presentations as well as a wide variety of tutorials and workshops offering hands-on experiences with different digital libraries and online archives.

Join iSchool faculty, staff, and students for the annual conference of the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE), which will take place virtually from September 20-24. The theme of ALISE 2021 is "Crafting a Resilient Future: Leadership, Education, and Inspiration."

Cayden Boyer, a senior from a small town near Peoria, Illinois, has expressed his appreciation for the BS/IS degree program by starting the Information Sciences Academic Fraternity. This new fraternity is an official student organization with a focus on helping future information professionals network and find more internship and career opportunities. Boyer's goal is to create a community of people with similar interests and advocate for their success.

Yosra Abdulwahid, a junior from Oak Forest, Illinois, is sharing her enthusiasm for her School through her service as an iSchool ambassador. She has had the opportunity to present to high school students about the BS in information sciences, participate in a student course showcase event, and attend the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Conference.

A paper authored by PhD student Smirity Kaushik and Associate Professor Yang Wang received the IAPP SOUPS Privacy Award at the 17th Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS 2021). The symposium, which was held August 8-10, brings together an interdisciplinary group of researchers and practitioners in human-computer interaction, security, and privacy.

The iSchool is pleased to announce that five of the eighteen students selected to participate in the 2021-2023 Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Kaleidoscope Diversity Scholars Program are from the University of Illinois. With the goal of attracting MS/LIS students from historically underrepresented racial and ethnic groups to careers in research libraries and archives, the Kaleidoscope Program offers financial support to scholars as well as leadership development through the ARL Annual Leadership Symposium, a formal mentoring program, career placement assistance, and a site visit to an ARL member library.

A paper by Associate Professor Halil Kilicoglu and Informatics PhD students Haoyang Liu and Janina Sarol received the Best System Paper Award at the 15th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2021). SemEval, which was held on August 5-6, is a series of natural language processing (NLP) research workshops whose mission is "to advance the current state of the art in semantic analysis and to help create high-quality annotated datasets in a range of increasingly challenging problems in natural language semantics."