Information Technology and Web Science at RPI

Hi everyone! My name is Lindsay Poirier, and I love Africa! I should explain. About a year and half ago, I had an epiphany. I want to go to Africa. It was strange. I had never wanted to go to Africa before; I had never even thought of it. It was just this random urge that overcame me. I was signed up with a volunteer program by the end of the following day. Since that fateful night, I have spent two of my winter breaks providing care and education for the orphans at Living Water Children Centre (LWCC) in Arusha, Tanzania. As a volunteer, I had the opportunity to immerse myself in the Tanzanian culture – eating the way they eat, sleeping the way they sleep, commuting the way they commute, living the way they live, and so on. Have you ever heard the term ‘culture shock’? Well, it’s real. When I landed in Tanzania for the first time, I could only think about how beautiful everything was. It looked exactly like the National Geographic pictures and travel documentaries....

It is tradition for the ITWS department to take their students to New York City on Grand Marshall Day. (GM Day is the day of GM Week where students get classes off. GM Week is the week when student elections are held. It's an RPI tradition!) Every year our plans are to go visit a couple companies, then meet up with Mike and Henry (2 RPI Alums) to give us a walking tour of NYC, and end the trip with a meet and greet with more alums at Red's. This year we followed tradition and visited Google and Goldman Sachs. While at Google we had a Q & A session with about 10 employees. They were all from different departments and gave us an interesting view on what it is like working at Google. They also talked about what kinds of people Google were looking to hire. They provided very insightful answers. After the Q & A session we were given a tour of the Google's NYC headquarters. They have recently purchased the entire building and it seems as though Google is hiring so fast th...

Today, we presented our final project in Intro to IT. Our task was to choose a website and make it more usable. My group: Andrew, Henry, Steve, and I decided to choose the website we were required to use for another IT class called IT & Society. Here is the link to the original: http://www.rpi.edu/~akeraa/IT-soc/ To come up with the design we evaluated the original design and usability using Nielsen's Heuristics. After going over the results we applied it to our design and this is what we came up with: http://www.akarnani.com/new_design/ We did some field testing and modified some things. In the end we received plenty of positive feedback and hope that our IT & Society professor will actually use the redesign. Our presentation was pretty nerve wrecking, but in the end I believe we did a pretty good job. Not bad for first semester freshman, to say the least.