Alumni Updates
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Bryce Newell
PhD, 2015
In 2023, Bryce was awarded tenure and promoted to the rank of associate professor at the University of Oregon, where he is a member of the Media Studies faculty within the School of Journalism and Communication (SOJC). He has also been appointed to serve as the director of the SOJC's undergraduate Honors Program.
Senteara Orwig
MLIS, 2015
Senteara accepted a job offer at Emanation Marketing Group as an event coordinator in management training.
Shekhar Parkhi
MSIM, 2015
In 2023, Shekhar reports: "After working for PayPal as an Integration Engineer and Solution Engineer for 6+ years, I got promoted to a people manager role during the pandemic. I currently run a team of 5-6 Solutions Engineers as part of PayPal's Professional Services Organization. This was a pivotal moment in my career journey, which was exciting as well as nerve-wracking. Now that I have been a people manager for the last couple of years, I am fairly settled into the day-to-day functions of the role and understand the operational aspects as well as the leadership aspects of the role.
"My team of Solutions Engineers is responsible for supporting the pre-sales stages of solution design for our channel partner clients and sales teams. We work directly with our strategic clients to help design for them the most optimal payments, identity, and platform solutions, using PayPal’s world-class technology and APIs, per their business and technical requirements. We strive to improve the products we work on from their users’ perspective and be the voice of the customer for our product and engineering teams, closing the feedback loop.
"I collaborate closely with our Sales and Business Development counterparts to make sure all their clients' needs are fulfilled at the earliest possible and PayPal makes the maximum return on the solution launch.
"I am overall responsible for mentoring and guiding the members of the team as they work on their solution engagements, and promoting the succession and development of the best talent in the group.
"There is so much I have learned about FinTech, payments, customer relationship management, sales, leadership, etc. at PayPal and am happy to continue to grow in this role in the near future."
Chelsea Pemberton
MLIS, 2015
Chelsea has been working at the Arlington, Texas, Public Library as a Community Programming Librarian for the last two years. In July 2017, she was preparing for a new role as the Early Childhood Librarian at the Episcopal School of Dallas, working alongside her iSchool Capstone partner, Megan Barnes.
Abhaya Pothina
MSIM, 2015
Abhaya is working at Disney as an interaction designer.
Steven Raden
Informatics, 2015
Steven is working in IBM Design and has learned a lot about working on a very large project divided up between many teams. He's also learned about working with teams spread across the globe. He's been given some awesome opportunities to travel and attend a few conferences such as Design Matters in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Megan Rawley
Informatics, 2015
Megan was promoted to Senior Program Manager at a small software company called DatStat, and recently hired a current iSchool student to be her Junior Program Manager. Since graduation, she introduced and has been building the Program Manager discipline at DatStat and is starting to see it grow.
Ashley Retzlaff
Informatics, 2015
Ashley is working for Microsoft as a program manager for Xbox Game Pass.
Nihar Sanghvi
MSIM, 2015
Nihar is working as a senior data scientist at Oracle Data Cloud in Colorado.
Daniel Schrader
MLIS, 2015
As of 2022, Daniel was working as a Principal UX Researcher at Slate.ai.