Earn a Graduate Degree and Write a Thesis: Check

Last week, check marks sprouted next to two items on my bucket list: earn a graduate degree and complete an individual thesis.

Before embarking on both journeys, I knew I loved to research and write. I felt like my mind, fascinated by such topics as journalism, astronomy, neuroscience, and colonial-era U.S. history, embodied the aphorism that a journalist’s expertise is a mile wide and an inch deep. Two years after becoming a student the University of Michigan School of Information, I have discovered where I want to go deep.

I want to understand how digital technology affects our relationships with ourselves, our significant others, our kids, our parents, our friends (and Friends), our governments, our devices, and the companies that manufacture those devices and harvest the data they so dutifully collect.

I’m a Millennial. I hand-wrote book reports in elementary school and made science projects out of cardboard and foam. My family bought a computer when I was nine years old, and I began typing my school assignments because tapping the keys was more fun than scrawling the pencil across the page. As a high schooler I conversed with friends over AIM; as a college student I was among the first generation to latch my social life to Facebook. I studied journalism as an undergraduate and watched digital technology pull the rug out of that industry right as I graduated and faced “the real world.”

I cannot imagine my life without digital technology. But I also wonder whether and how it is changing the way we live. Excited by our ability to capture, store, and disseminate large amounts of data, I designed my own curriculum in data storytelling to learn the basics of programming and design and apply those skills to the art of storytelling. The idea that people could use data to discover personal information (e.g., someone’s pregnancy) captivated me.

This became the basis for my thesis research in which I interviewed new mothers about their decisions to post baby pictures on Facebook. I had begun seeing baby pictures on my own Facebook News Feed, and I was curious whether the question of what to post and not post online entered new mothers’ minds.

As I was wrapping up one research interview a few months ago, the participant asked what I was studying.

“Data storytelling,” I replied, launching into my well-rehearsed, 30-second definition of this field of study.

“I feel like Facebook is the definition of data storytelling,” she said. “I am telling my life story in the way that I want to,…And it’s all data…That’s, like, the perfect thesis for what you’re studying.”

Her statement comforted me because I, for some reason, had equated data storytelling to working with numbers. But data is data, whether words or numbers. My thesis distilled more than 400 pages of interview transcripts into a story about what types of pictures new mothers do and don’t post online as well as what factors influence their decision.

The most rewarding aspect of completing this degree and this thesis has been hearing people’s enthusiasm and encouragement when I tell them what I’m doing. It is so exciting to believe you’re helping to make sense of what feels like a rapidly changing world, but also to realize that while the circumstances in which you’re asking the questions may be changing, the questions themselves are timeless. In the case of my thesis, taking baby pictures is nothing new, but broadcasting them to an audience of hundreds is.

One of my professors quoted a colleague of hers as saying, “Graduate school was when they stopped asking me the questions they already know the answers to.” In my time at UMSI, I’ve helped to answer some of those unanswered questions. I’m leaving campus with a better sense of what questions I want to ask of the world moving forward.

#MGoBlue  #MGoGrad