IMJR: Social Interaction and New Media
Current Pursuit: Senior Manager, Developer Advocacy, at Twilio
Why Individualized? I had a lot of interests during undergrad, and I spent a (potentially embarrassing) amount of time in the IMJR office speaking with advisors and talking about my options. I had a curiosity about a lot of different topics and wanted to find a way to graduate in four years while also scratching these intellectual itches.
Most memorable course or project from your major? The creation of my major was fundamentally formative. I was going a bit off-script, and I remember a faculty member asking me why I had philosophy coursework (specifically Metaphysics & Epistemology and Ethics) on my plan of study. It was exciting to be able to tell them all about the metaphysics of digital communication (which are super relevant today with parasocial relationships on social media!) and the ethics of technology usage. The IMJR program forced me to really think about the connections amongst these far-flung departments. I loved that the IMJR program challenged me to think about how an education is crafted, and that the program gave me the agency and guardrails to create my own education.
IMJR life impact? As I started applying to graduate programs, I started to recognize that there was a field of study called Human-Computer Interaction that was starting to emerge, and even some programs popping up that had this name. As a direct result of my individualized major, I found myself a part of an academic conversation that I might have missed out on if I hadn't been looking across disciplines from early on in my university career. Perhaps unsurprisingly, my major still serves as a fundamental lens for analyzing current events. Society is asking some challenging questions right now. What effect does social media have on kids' development? How will AI change the ways that we consume media? Will AI make people lonelier or more isolated? One common reflex is to approach these questions from a single perspective - the software engineer says it's just an engineering problem, and we need to build the right feature. The social scientist argues that it's purely a social problem, and we need to regulate or create policies that establish better practices around how the technology is used. But the answer tends to lie in both camps. Mind you, I still don't have answers to these questions. 😛 But my major has given me a broad set of analytical approaches to tackle them, and a predisposition to bring people from other disciplines in to help answer them.