Doctoral candidate Paige Cunningham successfully defended her dissertation, "Exploring Communication Patterns in Massive Open Online Courses," on May 6.

In Associate Professor Yoo-Seong Song's Applied Business Research class (IS 540), students learn advanced techniques of business research through hands-on experience with real-world clients. This semester, a team of students has been working with entrepreneur Douglass Lee, founder of the startup OneSoftDigm (OSD) and a senior in business at the University of Illinois.

MS/LIS student Monica Hoh has been awarded a fellowship from the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP). Of the 90 students and early-career professionals in publishing, librarianship, and information science who applied for the fellowship, twelve were selected. According to the SSP, this year's recipients were chosen based on their high level of engagement in their fields and represent a diverse range of skills in scholarly publishing and librarianship.

Cesar Ortega fell in love with libraries at the age of thirteen, when he joined the Aurora (IL) Public Library's Teen Advisory Board. The board was composed of a group of teens from around the city who created programs for the library. 

After she graduates next month, master's student Jenny Bruxvoort will move to Oregon to work as a research and instruction librarian at George Fox University. The job will combine her interest in academic libraries and her desire to support students.

Master's student Sharon Han has been selected as the winner of the 2019 Student Writing Award sponsored by Ex Libris Group and the Library and Information Technology Association (LITA) for her paper titled "Weathering the Twitter Storm: Early Uses of Social Media as a Disaster Response Tool for Public Libraries During Hurricane Sandy."

Doctoral candidate E.E. Lawrence will present at the 2019 Popular Culture Association National Conference, which will be held April 17-20 in Washington, D.C. Lawrence will give the talk, "Should the Public Library Promote Popular Fiction?," during the Libraries, Archives & Museum area's "Collections" session.

PhD student Jamillah R. Gabriel has received support from the University of Illinois and Drexel University to attend summer programs in the areas of critical theory and data science.

Doctoral candidate Alaine Martaus successfully defended her dissertation, "Modeling Participatory Literacy (In Your Pants): An Analysis of Print and New Media Convergence in the Vlogbrothers' YouTube Videos," on April 5.

Recent MS/IM graduate Abhiram Tripuraneni discusses his internship with PayPal and how the experience led him to a full-time position with the company.