Nature of IST and how about an "I-Journal"

Initially, IST was founded as a strategic school to address the new problems in the information era in the late 1990s. The nature that IST came into being in the call of the era, makes IST became very popular with students, industries and researchers. IST began expansion from the very beginning of its birth. Later, School of IST was turned into the College of IST. Throughout the state there are 1,891 students enrolled in IST plus an additional 12,000+ online IST students. The placement rate of undergraduate students between the years 2003-2006 was 94% and the 2006 average starting salary was $56,250. So far, it has been widely admitted that IST is a great success.

Generally, the success of IST has been attributed to the success of the problem-based learning teaching method. In addition to this, I would like to raise another point which I think is also very important for the success of IST.

The other factor that IST's success could be attributed to is IST's emphasis on team work. Recently a friend of mine, who is from another college, had an interview with Johnson&Johnson, which heavily hires IST students. In that interview, Johnson&Johnson asked him three questions, one of them is "Can you describe a situation when you have conflicts with your team members? How did you go through that?"  He was totally caught of guard. He debriefed to me that he had expected that the interviewer would ask such questions, he thought that the interviewer would ask questions related to his major. For him,team collaboration is rare since in their college they almost work on their own. It took him very long time to make up a team collaboration scenario to the recruiters.

But thinking back to IST, I can really understand why IST gradutes are popular with the employers, that is team work and team collaboration is highly valued in IST culture. This message is delivered to freshmen in their first IST course, IST110, and this team collaboration tradition is carried along their four years of study. So, it is very easy for IST students to handle the interview questions of this kind. This team collaboration emphasis contribute a lot to IST's success.

As to the graduate program of IST, I think it has achieved a lot, and it is going to achieve even more because we have great faculty here, and we have great students here. From the core course of IST gradute program, it can be found that IST is really trying very hard to push students to integrated Information, People and Technology altogether. I think so far we are still not sure whether this is an effort worthing doing. Ideally, integration of I,T and P is great. However, practitically, it is really very hard for students, and also, students do not seem to buy that ITP proposition. Students take the I,T,P courses in classes, but after classes, they usually do their own research respectively. T people do their T thing, P people do P thing and I people do I thing. Students from different angles really have few opportunity to work together, because most of the time they do not talk to each other.  So in this case, considering the fact IST is really trying to integrate I,T and P together, then, the current structure of no department is desirable, because if different departments are divided clearly, the chances that people from different department will collaborate decrease ever further.

As to myself, I think I fit into IST because I fit the HCI program, that is why I came here. HCI is really a interdisciplinary program. In the HCI lab, we have students from different fields, computer science, psychology, english, management information system, communication. The phenomenon that people from different field do not talk to each other never occur in HCI.

This is interesting in that in college level, people from different angles do not talk to each other a lot. But in the HCI field, the integration takes place. Why?

I think one factor that might influence the degree of integration is whether they share the same publication venues. For example, in HCI, there are HCI journals and conference. People doing HCI, not matter how backgrounds vary, they are all trying to publish in the place. then the collaboration among them form naturally.

But to IST, faculty from different angles publish papers in different places. thus it is hard for people from different angles to collaborate since publishing a paper in a field that is recognized by his own field is meaningless.

In conclusion, maybe a good way to let people from different angles to collaborate often is to creat a new jounal called "I-Journal".