Personas
Cindy Zhou
Ed Rivera
Annie Geever
Bosko Mijanovic
Meg Thompson
Cindy is an incoming SIMS student from mainland China. She has recently graduated from Zhejiang University with a bachelor's degree in Applied Mathematics. Although Cindy is extremely smart, and has, in fact, won a prestigious scholarship from a leading Chinese industrial company, she is a little more naive than many of the other students that are entering SIMS. This is due in part to her young age and to her lack of worldly experiences. She left her parents' house to go to college where she lived in student housing. She is about to move to a completely new country where her only relatives live in St. Paul, Minnesota. Her only work experiences have been in summer internships in her home town. Despite this, she is very excited about moving to the Bay Area. She looks forward to exploring a new part of the world and making new friends. She is also very conscientious about her commitment to the company that gave her her scholarship. She knows exactly what she wants to learn while she is at Berkeley (although once she arrives, she may be tempted to take completely different courses).
Cindy's main reservation about her upcoming trip is her ability to speak English. Although she studied English throughout college, the teachers were not native English speakers. Cindy has spoken English to very few native English speakers in her life and is somewhat nervous about her abilities. Cindy is much more confident about her technical abilities. She is profficient in many different computer applications and a few different programming languages.
Cindy's Goals:
- To find out more about Berkeley
- To find housing for the next year
- To make sure she will be able to satisfy her scholarship's requirements
- To "meet" some of her future classmates
- To not sound like a naive foreigner and to improve her English
Ed is a 1st-year SIMS Masters student, about halfway through his second semester. Ed is Hispanic, and a native Californian who was born and raised in San Diego and currently lives in El Cerrito. He is 26 and has a steady girlfriend. He went to UC Berkeley as an undergraduate, majoring in physics. After completing his degree he decided not to pursue science and got a job in San Francisco as a desktop and hardware support engineer at a law firm (as he had a lot of experience tinkering with computers). Four years later he was getting a little burnt out doing support, and decided that going back to school would be a good way to change his direction.
Ed has very strong hardware and tech support skills, but has limited programming and web experience. He took a few programming courses as an undergraduate, but is pretty rusty and tried to catch up by taking a self-paced Java course his first semester as Sims. The experience was pretty unpleasant, but he is persevering. He is comfortable working on Windows, Macintosh, and Unix machines.
Ed is very stressed out right now, not because of his classes (although he feels a little behind on the programming front), but because he is having trouble picking a direction for his next two semesters and for a final project. Many classes interest him, and he is having a hard time narrowing his focus. He is pretty social and enjoys hanging out with Sims folks, although he has an established social network in the area as well. He pays close attention to arenas for expanding his technical knowledge, and also enjoys sharing his own with other students when he can (usually on hardware issues).
Ed's Goals:
- To find an academic (and career) focus
- To learn Java really well
- To be able to share his technical knowledge
Annie is a 28-year old Master's student, in the middle of her last semester at SIMS. She grew up in Boston, the oldest child in a large Irish-American family. One of her passions is playing soccer, and she will happily argue the merits of soccer over inferior sports like football or basketball. In fact, on almost any topic, she has strong opinions which she is not shy about expressing.
Her bachelor's degree was in Linguistics at Amherst. After graduation, she worked for 5 years for a non-profit organization (Nature Conservancy of New England), starting as an administrative assistant. She became involved with development of their web site, taught herself HTML, and eventually became their webmaster. She has focused on web design at SIMS, and her final project involves a large web site with dynamic pages using ColdFusion. She has used a variety of bulletin board systems, including several web-based ones, and has complaints about all of them.
Currently she is sharing an apartment with another graduating SIMS student, who already has a job lined up and will be leaving the Bay Area. Since Annie wants to stay in the Bay Area, and likes her apartment, she is looking for a new roommate. It is important to her that if she posts an announcement about this, it should not be accessible to the world at large, but only to SIMS students.
Annie's Goals:
- To finish her final project
- To find a job
- To find a new roommate
- To make SIMS (and the rest of the world) a better place
Bosko Mijanovic is one of the almost-invisible PhD students. He does not go to classes (as far as anyone can tell) and is rarely seen in South Hall. His presence is felt, however, because he is a frequent and voluble contributer to any and all online discussions, whatever the format (e-mail lists, web pages, whatever). He is occasionally seen at Thirsty Thursdays and, this semester, is a T.A. for Pamela Samuelson's Cyberlaw class. For the class, he is in charge of encouraging extended discussions of class topics.
Bosko has very strong technical skills, is a programmer, and is comfortable using any platform and any software. He likes to tinker and get under the hood of anything.
Bosko is 32, Serbian, and has an undergraduate degree in Sociology from Glasgow University in Scotland. He is a fierce believer in a united Europe. He is extremely tall - 6'6" - and rowed competitively in college. His thesis is an Ethnography of Online Shopping (he's studying the shopping habits of bluelight.com shoppers). He also does related consulting work on the side.
Bosko's Goals:
- To finish his thesis
- To grow his consulting business
- To share his opinions about . . . everything
- To encourage discussion in his Cyberlaw class
- To meet single women :)
Meg is an alumna of the SIMS masters program. She was one of the slightly older students; she is now 38 and graduated in 2000. She has a partner with whom she rents a small but classy apartment in the Point Adams area of Oakland. Meg is from a small town in Oregon and enjoys outdoor activities. Occasionally she wishes she were still living in a woodsy mountain area, but she is usually satisfied by the hiking that is available in the vicinity of the Bay Area.
Meg graduated from a small Oregon college in 1985 and promptly began working at her hometown elementary school library. Within a few years she had found a more challenging job at the local town library. While she was working there, the library implemented an automated cataloging system. Meg got to work on the automation project and became quite interested in that and other information systems. After working at the library for nearly ten years, Meg realized that to get much farther in her career, she would have to go back to school. Looking at MLS programs, she came across the new MIMS program at Berkeley and decided to apply there. She decided that Berkeley would not only give her an advanced degree but also give her important technical skills that could be leveraged for an even better position. She found herself interested in database design, web design and user interface design and not so intrigued by the standard library science courses. Although she had planned to go back to work for a library when she finished, she now decided to take the plunge into Silicon Valley. Unfortunately, after a few months, the startup she was working for went out of business and she lost her job. Having found her niche, however, she decided to stay in the area and open up her own consulting business.
Meg has become quite proficient at using different software packages for her work- and school-based projects. She also uses email to stay in touch with her friends from Oregon and her graduating SIMS class.
Meg's Goals:
- To stay in touch with past SIMS classmates as well as current and future students
- To get advice, advertise her business, and recruit SIMS students to work for her
- To know where her former classmates are and what they're up to
Last Modified: Feb-19-2001
Copyright 2001: Linda Duffy, Jean-Anne Fitzpatrick, Sonia Klemperer-Johnson, James Reffell