One of the fun symposiums I have had the pleasure of participating in was the annual University of Tennessee Research Symposium. I remember my first poster presentation back in 2008 on a study I worked on at USC during my Master’s degree – I was so nervous about presenting since it was my first poster and research presentation ever!
Our winning poster from UTRS 2012!
A lot has happened since the first research symposium I have participated in – it has been a great way to collaborate with friends and fellow colleagues on various studies and share them with others. Last year, I had the opportunity to work with my friend Monica on a study looking at the perception of Google Scholar among undergraduate students, and we tied for best poster. We had the chance to work on other projects as well like academic libraries and Google Books and most recently looking at the use of Quora to build communities of practice among academic libraries.
This year, I worked on a case study exploring the crisis frames emerging from the Maria Macias blogger case study in Mexico with my friend and PhD student at Tennessee, Ioana Coman, and Justin West. This was a project where we looked at how traditional media in both Mexico and the US were framing this story, and their overall comments / perceptions regarding the use of social media. It was a very interesting project to work on, and Ioana and Justin are great collaborators and researchers to work with. We actually won the best poster for this year’s research symposium. Congrats Ioana and Justin! 🙂
I really liked working with both Ioana and Monica on these projects. Both are PhD students at the University of Tennessee, and are were both wonderful to work with. I was impressed with the level of hard work, dedication, and commitment both had to their areas of interest in research and practice. It was fun for me to learn about academic libraries / knowledge management and journalism/crisis framing in both of these projects – yes, they are not in my main area of research – but they did incorporate social media into the mix, so that is where I can in and was able to help.
What we are seeing presently in research is the growing need to be transdisiciplinary – working with others in other disciplines on research projects and collaborate in looking at a particular phenomenon. This is what Monica, Ioana, and I have been doing with just these couple of projects. I feel fortunate to work with both of these talented and young researchers and scholars at the University of Tennessee – I am sure both will continue to do great and wonderful things in their fields. UT is very fortunate to have students like Monica and Ioana in their program.
Hope you all are having a great day!
Best Wishes,
Karen
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