What is IST?

The College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) in Penn State University is built in response to the rapidly growing of information. The goal of IST is to be the best at the conversion of theory into practice. IST's flavor can be seen in various aspects. Job placement of IST students can reach 95% with the average salary of $56,250. Jobs in business analysis, IT security, risk services and consulting are popular among IST students. Also, IST provides inter and multi-discipline research like health informatics, medical informatics, emergency response, enterprise informatics and globalization. IST has diverse kinds of faculty and students. The diversity of faculty can be seen from that faculty come from a lot of different countries and different backgrounds such as psychology, physics and astronomy. The diversity of students is similar.

The structure of IST is different from other colleges since it has no departments. But IST has various centers and labs with different research tracks. For example, IST has center for information assurance, center for the information society, enterprise informatics and integration center and so on, while it also has applied cognitive science laboratory, cyber security laboratory, information science and learning laboratory and intelligence information systems laboratory and so on. Also, IST provides 17 research areas like artificial intelligence and informatics, human computer interaction, community informatics.

This kind of structure, though may cause some problems in the management, can encourage intersection collaboration for faculties and students, facilitate diversity in research and can provide more flexibility for students. For me, my research interest focuses on social network analysis, which also employs the knowledge of artificial intelligence, community informatics, learning and innovation, search and information retrieval. Also, some applications that integrate social network analysis and human computer interaction have shown up. So I think I could be a member of several research tracks and I could benefit a lot from this kind of inter-discipline research.