One of our visions at IST Building is to bridge the gap between the undergraduate and the graduate communities. We co-exist within the College of IST but the second and third floors represent more than just a physical separation. Unless you are unusually well-connected within the College, it would be difficult to know what’s going on in the other community. For instance, with the current resources available, it’s a hassle for me as an undergrad to try to reach out to a grad student who is an expert in a particular field of interest. Where is the information readily available? As a solution, our goal for this website is to grow and facilitate the dynamics within the College of IST as a whole.

The main articles section of IST Building is a fairly comprehensive glimpse at the current affairs among the undergraduate students. Now we intend to build out another section of the website to peer into the world of the grad students. We are working on a wiki database that will detail the current IST research projects (unclassified, of course), the researchers involved, and detail the experience and background of each researcher if possible. This will be 20 times better than the current resources on the ist.psu.edu domain, and it is intended to be user-generated content so the researcher can update his or her own page.

I’d love to be able to consult the mentorship of a grad student in the field of HCI or search engines, and find out who is currently involved in those fields with just a few clicks of the mouse. This is only a small fraction of the summer projects we have queued up for IST Building, so keep on the look out for new features and tools.

Tags: graduate, Research, undergraduate

Categories: Research, Suggestions