Learn About a Lecturer: Kristin Chaffin
Lecturer: Kristin Chaffin
Location: Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Education: MSIS from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
What do you teach at SIS?
INSC 384, the database design course. This will be my second term teaching it; I taught it this past fall for the first time. It’s been a lot of fun to teach; this is not my first foray into teaching undergraduate classes, but most of the courses I have taught have been graduate courses.
Graduate students usually have a little more work experience, and undergraduates may not have considered as many career possibilities as graduate students have so it was a joy last semester to watch as student’s eyes were opened to many career options within information science that they had not previously considered. They also discovered that database design was actually more complex and detailed than they had originally thought. It’s really fun to share that with them and to see what their reactions are to the application of what they’re learning, and to discuss some of the pathways different organizations go down to solve problems. If you don’t have a lot of work experience you may not be aware of how the information systems an organization uses can really impact its processes and operations.
Why teach at SIS?
I love teaching and I like sharing my experiences with people. I also really like it when I see people get it, see that light go off in their eyes. I taught for a while at the UNC School of Information and Library Science and while I was teaching in person there and it was very satisfying, I found I missed the hands-on work in terms of doing projects, so I went to IBM for several years and focused on that. My next teaching experience was with the University of Washington in their iSchool master’s program. And while I enjoyed the course material, the format was asynchronous/online and it didn’t give me the same intrinsic joy since I really missed the real-time interaction with the students.
When SIS Professor Diane Kelly asked me to teach this class and said it was online and synchronous, I was definitely interested. I like being able to share with students what I have learned, but I also really like hearing their questions and the group discussion around particular projects or issues. The diversity of experience and questions that people bring is really exciting to me.
How did you become interested in information sciences?
I have an undergraduate degree in anthropology and I graduated and said to myself, “What do I do with this?” I ended up going back to school at UNC-Chapel Hill and got my degree in information sciences. I took a reference course as my very first course thinking I wanted to go the librarian route. I thought it wouldn’t teach me many new things because I knew a great deal about reference, but it opened my eyes entirely to the types of skills and knowledge that were really needed in these areas.
Then I started taking other courses in the program and I took a database course and it made so much sense to me. When I took that course, I thought, “This is how I think!” and that’s how I got diverted to information sciences and the whole database track.
One of the things that’s really interesting to me and is the reason why information sciences really grabbed me, as opposed to computer science or other areas, is that while technology is interesting, what I find most interesting is what people can do with it. They use it to make work easier, to make life easier, and the possibilities there are just tremendous. In anthropology, I took the full range of physical anthropology and cultural anthropology courses. I was more interested in the physical, focusing on how people use tools, and in the information sciences, it’s still the same thing. How can I find the best tool to address this problem? I found it very intriguing to apply these practices to information sciences.
What is your professional background?
I have kind of weird employment history. After I graduated with my MSIS, I worked at a start-up as an Oracle database administrator and did that for several years. Then I went back to UNC to teach database courses as a fixed-term faculty and I taught more advanced database courses, web development, and database administration.
I then went to work for IBM. There I held multiple roles – I was a data engineer, data architect, database administrator, technical team lead, and more – and I got a lot of experience at IBM that was really very helpful. Over those years, I kept hopping back and forth between the corporate world and academia, hoping to find the right balance between my love for teaching and working with business clients to help them solve their business and technical needs.
After several years of this, I decided I really wanted to get back into academia again and started working as a business analyst at the Kenan-Flagler business school, also at UNC Chapel Hill, in their undergraduate program. That’s where I am now, and of course I’m teaching for SIS at the University of Tennessee.
Why is information sciences important to the modern world?
I think it’s very important because most organizations, if not all, are using technology to some extent. You have technical folks who can come in and implement technology, but they’re really focused on the technology itself – having the ability to understand how people can really use technology in a specific context is where the difference can be made. There are people who can speak the technical language and people who can speak the business language, but those who can bridge that gap are really critical. If you can bridge that gap and really understand what the business needs are and what the technology is, you can make better decisions on how to implement that technology.
It’s too often that people interested in technology are too interested in how whizbang it is but they are not always thinking about how well it addresses the current problem, and I think information science really sits at that juncture and that’s why it’s so important.
I also think a lot of companies are realizing that the technical skills are skills you can teach, but the skills that are more difficult to teach are those soft skills you need when addressing a business problem. Being able to talk to both business stakeholders and to technology folks is a really valuable skill. Whether you’re interested in working for a nonprofit, for-profit, or in academia, you still have people trying to solve problems and use technology to effectively solve those problems.