Category Archives: Student Spotlight

October 30, 2020 By Hillary Tune

Undergrad Holland Parkins First Ever SIS Student to be a CCI Land Ambassador

Junior Holland Parkins recently became the first ever College of Communications and Information Land Ambassador for the School of Information Sciences (SIS), a position in which she will represent the college and assist CCI with student recruitment, student retention, alumni relations, community outreach, and college events.

What is a CCI Land Ambassador?

The CCI Land Ambassador program was established in 2012 through funding from Stephen Land, a 1978 graduate of the School of Journalism and Electronic Media. Land has served on the CCI Board of Visitors, and is CEO of Jupiter Entertainment, a television production company based out of … Read more “Undergrad Holland Parkins First Ever SIS Student to be a CCI Land Ambassador”

October 22, 2020 By Hillary Tune

MSIS Student Spotlight: Adam Hembree Pursues Interest in Public Librarianship and Archives Pathways

Featured student: Adam Hembree

Location: Knoxville, TN

Education: Bachelor’s in Spanish and interdisciplinary studies, Christopher Newport University, Newport News, Virginia; Master’s degree in applied linguistics from Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia.

Career/Background: After I did my undergrad, I worked my way up at Rosetta Stone to being an area manager in Hampton Roads, Virginia,where I’m from, and it got me really interested in linguistics and language learning – I was already interested in that, but that solidified it. I went back to school for linguistics and I ended up doing a concentration in TESOL (teaching English to speakers of other … Read more “MSIS Student Spotlight: Adam Hembree Pursues Interest in Public Librarianship and Archives Pathways”

April 22, 2020 By Hillary Tune

Student Jessica Giles Creates Map to Track People’s Movements During the Pandemic

One of the reasons student Jessica Giles entered the MSIS program was to learn how to better represent data through visualization for her job as an associate data engineer at Intermx in Atlanta, Georgia. She had hoped to gain skills that would allow her to put data and statistics into an easy-to-consume format for the public. Her most recent work project achieved just that: Giles used data of people’s movements during the COVID-19 pandemic and placed it into an interactive map with adjacent graphs that anyone can access and use.

While the idea for the map initially stemmed from clients … Read more “Student Jessica Giles Creates Map to Track People’s Movements During the Pandemic”

March 12, 2020 By Hillary Tune

Student Spotlight Jeff Zentner is a Musician, Lawyer, Author, and Librarian is Next on His List

Featured student: Jeff Zentner

Location: Nashville, TN

Education: Bachelor’s degree in communications from University of Utah, law degree from Vanderbilt University Law School

Career/Background: I’ve had a number of different lives. I used to be a musician. As a musician, I recorded several albums with bands and solo, and wrote a bunch of songs. I’ve worked with Iggy Pop, Nick Cave, and Debbie Harry. I toured and played festivals and such. That was a lot of fun but it ran its course.

So I went to law school and was a civil litigator in private practice for four years, but … Read more “Student Spotlight Jeff Zentner is a Musician, Lawyer, Author, and Librarian is Next on His List”

February 26, 2020 By Hillary Tune

Student Spotlight: Kristy Cunningham Combines a Passion for People and Tech

Featured student: Kristy Cunningham
Location: Cookeville, TN
Education: Bachelor’s in Management Information Systems, MBA from Tennessee Tech, will graduate Spring 2020 with an MSIS

Career: I work at Tennessee Tech, but not in the library. I am the assistant director for the Center for Career Development; I do resume reviews, career fairs, classroom presentations about interviews and resumes, and teach students about Tennessee Tech’s Handshake job database system. There are four of us in the office, for a campus of about 10,000 students, so we stay very busy.

I’ve been here 15 years, and this is my third job at … Read more “Student Spotlight: Kristy Cunningham Combines a Passion for People and Tech”

January 30, 2020 By Hillary Tune

MSIS Student Rachael Murphy Uses Practicum to Explore Diversity & Inclusion in Hodges Library

MSIS student Rachael Murphy started an assistantship at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s Hodges Library in fall 2019, conducting a “kindness audit.” The audit takes an inventory of all the signage throughout the library to assess what kind of messages or ideas are being communicated to those who walk into the building.

“We’re looking at, do they feel comfortable, do we create spaces that make them want to come back? We’re taking into consideration people who have disabilities or marginalized identities, things that people may not consider when they think of a library,” Murphy said.

They underestimated the work the … Read more “MSIS Student Rachael Murphy Uses Practicum to Explore Diversity & Inclusion in Hodges Library”

Diversity & Inclusion

November 12, 2019 By Hillary Tune

Student Spotlight: Yasmin Stoss Zeroes in on Providing Information Access to Researchers

Featured student: Yasmin Stoss.
Location: Knoxville, TN.
Education: Bachelor’s degree in psychology with a minor in Japanese.

Career: After graduating, I was working for a while, I had two full-time jobs before I started the master’s program. One of them was working with an institutional review board at a different university and through that job, I got a job with a tech company, Techsoftware.

At the IRB, my role was as a coordinator, and I was something like a compliance officer as well. I would review research submissions, give people feedback if they didn’t structure things well, and teach our … Read more “Student Spotlight: Yasmin Stoss Zeroes in on Providing Information Access to Researchers”

November 9, 2019 By Hillary Tune

Will Biggs: Veteran, Purple Heart Recipient, MSIS Student, Second-Gen Vol

When Will Biggs left the United States Marine Corps after 10 years of service, he started a job hunt that proved to be a bit rougher than he had anticipated.

“I was looking at county jobs and had probably applied to at least 15 positions, and nobody gave me a chance until the public libraries did,” he said. “I started working at the library and I realized I liked it.”

It was quite the change from his military service, for which he received a Purple Heart in 2006 after suffering injuries from an IED blast. Both the injuries and his … Read more “Will Biggs: Veteran, Purple Heart Recipient, MSIS Student, Second-Gen Vol”

October 10, 2019 By Hillary Tune

MSIS Student Frankie McGinnis on Being a Student, Live Organ Donor, and Caregiver

Since this article was published in the SIS “Spark” magazine, Frankie McGinnis’ daughter, Laura, passed away. But, the University of Tennessee created and approved a new employee leave policy and named it the Laura McGinnis Policy on Organ Donation in January 2020 in her honor. You can view the entire “Spark” magazine here.

When SIS student Frankie McGinnis sees a problem, she will build a solution for it from the ground up. She is not the type to find a band-aid for it and move on, but instead fights for the best possible outcome.

That was the case when she … Read more “MSIS Student Frankie McGinnis on Being a Student, Live Organ Donor, and Caregiver”

September 13, 2019 By Hillary Tune

Student Spotlight: Clancy Anderson Joins IMLS Project to Support Veterans Via Library Services

Featured student: Clancy Anderson

Location: Bristol, Tenn.

Education: Training as a submarine nuclear reactor operator in the Navy, and an undergraduate degree in history from Eastern Connecticut State University

Career: I grew up on a ranch in Central Montana, then I went to being on a submarine in the Navy, to being a librarian in East Tennessee. I went to college and it just wasn’t for me at that point, so I enlisted in the Navy and became a submarine nuclear reactor operator. I did six years and two deployments overseas into the Persian Gulf area. I got out of … Read more “Student Spotlight: Clancy Anderson Joins IMLS Project to Support Veterans Via Library Services”

The University of Tennessee, Knoxville

School of Information Sciences
College of Communication and Information