According to Leep student Robyn Whitlock, the iSchool's school librarian licensure program has done "an amazing job" of preparing her for a career as a school librarian. Her advice to students considering school librarianship is "go for it!" As she nears the end of her program, Whitlock "couldn't be more excited about the future." 

For a decade, the Illinois Cyber Security Scholars Program (ICSSP) has been offering scholarships to undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Illinois in exchange for government service after graduation. The program is offered through the University's Information Trust Institute (ITI), an interdisciplinary research center addressing all aspects of information trust.

This semester, students in Associate Professor Yoo-Seong Song's Applied Business Research class (IS 540) worked with COUNTRY Financial at the Research Park on a project examining the impact of autonomous vehicles and smart cities on the insurance industry. The student consulting team's research provided the company with a glimpse of how the additional liability autonomous vehicles bring would change the landscape of the insurance industry.

MS/IM student Devashish Sahay discusses his summer internship at PwC. After he graduates this month, he will return to PwC as a technology consultant.

MS/LIS student Annabel Pinkney has been awarded a grant from the Caxton Club, a not-for-profit organization devoted to the study and promotion of the book arts. The grant will support her project, "Advanced Studies of the Book Structure," in which Pinkney is creating a portfolio of at least ten book repair treatments of varying difficulty.

MS/IM student Pranay Parmar won first place in the Data Visualization Competition sponsored by the University of Illinois Library's Scholarly Commons. The competition provides students with an opportunity to demonstrate their skills in visually communicating information. Winners were announced on October 22 at the 2019 Scholarly Commons Open House.

MS/LIS student Monica Hoh was invited by the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) to participate in the Frankfurter Buchmesse (Frankfurt Book Fair). The event, which was held October 16-20 in Frankfurt, Germany, is the world's largest trade fair for books and draws more visitors than any other book fair.

As a young professional working to advance her career, Leep student Erica Halpern appreciates the flexibility and convenience of the iSchool's online MS/LIS program. She also is grateful for the George Bonn Scholarship that she received from the School, which removed a "huge financial burden" and has allowed her to focus on her studies.

This past summer MS/LIS students Kaylen Dwyer and Jasmine Wong participated in the Oxford-Illinois Digital Library Placement Program, an ongoing collaboration between Illinois and Oxford. The 2019 program partnered with the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) as part of the grant "Digging Deeper, Reaching Further: Libraries Empowering Users to Mine the HathiTrust Digital Library Resources." The students proposed their own independent projects and were advised by faculty members at Oxford e-Research Center, David de Roure and Kevin Page, and iSchool partners Professor J. Stephen Downie and Visiting Research Services Specialist Ryan Dubnicek.

iSchool faculty and students will participate in the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) Annual Meeting, which will be held October 19-23 in Melbourne, Australia. The theme of this year’s conference is “Information…Anyone, Anywhere, Anytime, Anyway.” The meeting, now in its 82nd year, is the premier international conference dedicated to the study of information, people, and technology in contemporary society. Associate Professor and MS/IM Program Director Catherine Blake serves as co-chair for this year’s conference. Associate Professor and BS/IS Program Director Emily Knox and Affiliate Professor Clara Chu are members of the ASIS&T Board of Directors, contributing to governance activities.