Congratulations to ATLAS teaching assistant professor Anthony Pinter, who was recently honored with the i3 Outstanding Mentor Award for the 2022-2023 cohort.
The iSchool Inclusion Institute (i3) is an undergraduate research and leadership program that prepares students from underrepresented backgrounds for graduate study and careers in the information sciences. Each year, the program selects 25 students from across the U.S. to be i3 Scholars, in which they undertake a full-year research project and two summer institutes hosted by the University of Texas at Austin.
Such experience translates into much higher acceptance and success rates for students who want to pursue graduate degrees, and the program is notable for helping those with non-STEM majors to enter graduate programs in information and computing sciences.
Pinter has worked with i3 in several capacities including teaching fellow, research advisor and core leadership team member. He says, "I've been involved in i3 in some way since 2017, and I genuinely look forward to every opportunity I get to visit the program and interact with i3ers and the surrounding community.”
For the past year, he has mentored a team of three i3 Scholars:
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Martia Williams, a 2022 graduate of North Carolina State University with a degree in mathematics education and a minor in English
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Katha Patel, a junior at University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, majoring in political science with a minor in criminology law and society
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Janai Adams, a 2023 graduate of Texas State University with a degree in marketing and a minor in philosophy
From left: Dr. Pinter, Dr. Kayla Booth (i3 Director), Martia Williams, Katha Patel, Janai Adams and Dr. Joe Sanchez (i3 Core Leadership Team)
Together they have collaborated on a research project that has yielded an undergraduate first-authored publication, “Music sounds better with(out) you: Curating streaming music as part of post-break-up identity management” (Patel et al., 2023).
Their research explores how people treat music as a digital possession in the context of break-ups, how they save and interact with music post-break-up, and how memories affect people’s listening interactions with that music on streaming platforms. Music connects deeply to memory and experience, and in this context, it acts as a component of post-break-up identity.
The team is hard at work preparing a full paper, first-authored by Martia Williams, that will likely be submitted to the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), which is generally considered the most prestigious in the field of human-computer interaction.
Pinter reflects, “i3 is a one-of-a-kind program in the nation, and the quality of students and research work coming out of i3 is nothing short of incredible—nevermind that it is largely undergraduate driven work! Katha, Martia, and Janai's project with me is no exception. From day one, they've been incredibly involved in the research process. Their investment in the project showed in their iConference poster and in the paper they are currently preparing for submission to CHI. I love working with undergraduate students on research and creative endeavors, and my work with Katha, Martia, and Janai only further underscores how important mentoring and collaboration with students is to me."
The team presented their research findings at iConference.
