Influencers

Xin Wang - Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Education: Bachelors in Electrical Engineering (Peking University), PhD in Computer Science (UC San Diego)

Family: Xin is recently married and doesn’t have any children. His parents live in a small town near Shanghai.

Goals: In the short term, Xin has a few publications that he’s working on and would like to see published. His long term goal is to find a tenure-track position at a U.S. university.

Pain: When he was a grad student, Xin felt that there was more camaraderie among his peers as well as a closer relationship with faculty. Now, his position grants him a lot of independence but this contributes to Xin feeling isolated from his colleagues in the department.

Media & Device Preference: Xin prefers using his smartphone for almost everything. He likes to go on social media apps like WeChat and Weibo as well American equivalents like Facebook and Instagram, but he’s simply too busy to use them much anymore. He also likes to read Chinese news through the Jinri Toutiao news app.

Role & Responsibilities: Xin doesn’t necessarily have a well-defined role within the department. His primary responsibility is to work on his research while applying for faculty positions. On a day-to-day basis, this involves a lot of sitting in front of the computer and writing code. He has a handful of meetings every week but most of his work is self-directed. Since he knows that teaching is an important part of being a professor, he would like to gain some experience teaching a class before his fellowship is over.

Biography/Scenario: Immediately after finishing his undergraduate studies in China, Xin came to the U.S. to pursue a PhD in Computer Science at UC San Diego. He really enjoyed his experience in grad school and even met his wife while studying there. Although he would have liked to have immediately started applying for faculty positions after finishing his dissertation, he quickly discovered how competitive the application process is. His PhD advisor had some connections at UC Berkeley and advised him to pursue a postdoctoral fellowship there in order to make himself a stronger candidate. Since starting his fellowship, he has found the independence liberating but also isolating. His interactions with faculty tend to be cordial but brief since his position is temporary by nature. He would like to collaborate with more faculty but few of them can relate to his research in computer graphics since it’s a relatively niche field.

Denise Alderman - Administrative Assistant

Education: Associate’s Degree

Family: Married, 3 adult children

Goals: Retirement

Pain: Email communication is imperfect and requires a lot of follow-up.

Media & Device Preference: Denise likes to check Facebook in the mornings and evenings on her tablet. She prefers physical text but finds digital to be more convenient these days. She uses the Bing search engine and likes to browse the news stories that appear on the search page. When she’s bored at home, she likes to play games on her iPad.

Role & Responsibilities: Denise handles all of the necessary tasks that keep the department running. She keeps track of departmental expenses and makes sure that faculty’s travel arrangements are taken care of. Faculty check with her to see how they should charge certain expenses.

Biography/Scenario: Denise has been in her current position for 15 years and she’s admired within the department. Faculty rely on her to take care of all of the department’s complicated administrative duties. She’s developed friendships within the department but over the past few years, her position has become more email-dependent and she misses the small talk she used to have with professors and fellow staff members.

Claire Edwards - Research Administrator

Education: Bachelors in Psychology, Master’s in Higher Education

Family: Divorced, single mom, 1 kid in college and 1 in high school

Goals: She’d like to go to more conferences and get her CRA (Certified Research Administrator) certification.

Pain: She likes to meet with all faculty members once/month for a one-on-one check-in to see where they’re at with their research. There are a few faculty members that routinely forget to check-in and she has to remind them several times by email, and occasionally “track them down” to meet with them.

Media & Device Preference: She checks Facebook in the morning and evenings on her smartphone. When she’s home, she likes to listen to the news on the TV in the background. Since the faculty in her department do a lot of work with NASA, she makes sure to check in on NASA’s website occasionally while at work to see what’s going on.

Role & Responsibilities: She supports faculty members’ research by handling the administrative responsibilities involved. She manages professors’ research funding and helps them collect documents for their pre-award applications. This involves a lot of communication between faculty and herself, much of which is handled through email.

Biography/Scenario: Although Claire has worked within the same university for 12 years, she has moved between departments twice and found it difficult to adjust to the unique departmental administrative systems. She’s still adjusting to her most recent appointment in the Aerospace Engineering Department. Since she works directly with faculty on a day-to-day basis, she’s trying to develop more effective communication methods so they don’t fall behind on NSF’s post-award reporting requirements.

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