Blau Exchange: Spring 2007 Roundtable (T1)

THREAD #1

Paul DiPerna:

What have your graduate school experiences been like so far?

Fred Stutzman:

Well, lots of classes :) And I've enjoyed them. I did my first year of graduate school part time, and then I transitioned over to full-time.

So while I am technically a second-year student, this is actually my third year in graduate school. Some of the highlights were organizing the UNC Social Software Symposium, but the greatest moment was probably the Aha! moment when I realized that I could easily collect data from Facebook if I just wrote some software. That inspired me like nothing before.

Miia Akkinen:

Hello everyone, and greetings from Finland.

I am a graduate student in the Helsinki School of Economics, in the department of Information Systems Science. I enjoy studying information systems from the business perspective.

Paul Lawton:

Starting grad school, I was thrust into this position of actually having to think, which I used to take for granted - "I am thinking all the time!" - but this is different. Though you progress rapidly in grad school, sometimes you are not progressing fast enough, except now you have looming deadlines and people expecting "great things." Things also tend to happen that are out of your control; I always felt one step removed from disaster when I first started doing my own research.

For example, I can remember clearly when I finally started doing my field work for my MA thesis. I did a study on Metafilter using a framework set out by French Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. I was interested in how, in this online community where there were no clear visual distinctions between users aside from screen names, how people socially positioned themselves. Some users were clearly seen as "celebrities" within the community, others becoming "notorious" - the villains, and how most of the others were lumped together in a identity-less parade of user names that didn't stand out from the group at all. Sociology, I found the question of "why" to be compelling, and a topic which had not been researched.

This was all rested on a finely tuned prospectus and introductory chapter that talked about this in relation to Metafilter being a "closed community" - that is, new memberships were closed to the public. Data collection was going along well - there were certainly challenges Then, I wake up one morning, and log on to find that Matt (Metafilter's owner) had swung the doors wide open to the public. All of a sudden, I loose the relatively stable (or at least stabilizing) group of 17000, and add about 10000 new members in the space of a few weeks. Needless to say, I was terrified! This changed the whole playing field, and I had to adapt accordingly. It all turned out fine in the end - there were certainly many interesting things that happened with this influx of new people signing up, but at the time it seemed like it was the end of the world.

Sarita Yardi:

I love the people I get to hang out with on a daily basis! The people in the labs and research groups in my building are working on fascinating projects. Both the professors and students always seem so happy to be there. This was the biggest selling point for Georgia Tech to me when I was choosing between programs.

In my own lab, Electronic Learning Communities, we joke around and laugh a lot. My lab mates (Andrea, JP, and Kurt) and I love to talk about our research and we find ourselves having informal ad-hoc conversations about all sorts of interesting things on a regular basis. I think the most learning and insight I've gotten in my own research has come from these discussions.

The other week Andrea and JP were chatting over IM about something funny (even though they sit 10 feet from each other) and JP typed LOL in response. Andrea looked over and saw that JP wasn't laughing at all and called him out on it: "No you're not laughing right now!" I love how the boundaries between our online and offline lives interplay. It's a fascinating field to be in. I also often find my personal life and research life overlapping in various ways. I'm friends with my professors on Facebook and Flickr which I like because I'm always curious what they're up to, although I'm not sure that they share the same interest.