Featured Student: Josh Melendez

Hometown: Clarksville, Tennessee

What drew you to the University of Tennessee, Knoxville?

I’m originally from Clarksville, Tennessee, and I heard about UT from word of mouth and how great the program is and how the faculty and staff really care about students. During my high school time, I did dual enrollment at another university and got familiar with that program, and I felt my peers and teachers weren’t really passionate.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”