Category Archives: Student Spotlight

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”

May 9, 2019 By Hillary Tune

Lisa Ladd Heads to ALA with Marcellus Turner Student Travel Scholarship

MSIS student Lisa Ladd is the 2019 Marcellus Turner Student Travel Scholarship Award winner, and she’s thrilled that it will fund her trip to the American Library Association Conference in Washington, D.C. this June.

Though she has attended the ALA conference in the past in her capacity as a library professional, she has never gone as a student. After completing one semester in the SIS program, Ladd knew she wanted to attend the conference and learn more about her pathway, youth informatics. But without a scholarship, she said it wasn’t going to happen. It’s been a long journey for her … Read more “Lisa Ladd Heads to ALA with Marcellus Turner Student Travel Scholarship”

April 23, 2019 By adminatcci

Student Spotlight: Kashif Graham Finds New Calling in Theological Librarianship

Featured student: Kashif Graham

Location: Nashville

Education: Bachelor’s of Arts in English literature, and Spanish from Lehman College (City University of New York); Master of Arts in Church Ministry from the Pentecostal Theological Seminary in Cleveland, Tennessee; will graduate Spring 2019 with an MSIS degree.

Current job: I moved to Nashville to start working at Vanderbilt Divinity School Library as collections maintenance coordinator and then was promoted to outreach librarian for religion and theology.

Why SIS?

I can think of a time in the eighth grade where I didn’t feel so safe in my school any more, so I hid … Read more “Student Spotlight: Kashif Graham Finds New Calling in Theological Librarianship”

The University of Tennessee, Knoxville

School of Information Sciences
College of Communication and Information