Graduating master's student Stephanie Pakrul was a presenter at this year's DrupalCon in San Francisco. Stephanie is a developer and designer for the Drupal content management system and the co-owner of a small business selling pre-made Drupal themes.
Drupal is an open-source social publishing software for publishing, managing and organizing web content. Tens of thousands of organizations use Drupal to power community web portals, corporate web sites, social networking sites, personal web sites or blogs, and much more — including the website for the School of Information.
DrupalCon is the leading conference for Drupal developers and one of the most important open source technology events of the year. This year's event in San Francisco was the biggest ever, with more than 3,000 participants from around the world. At the conference stakeholders in the platform, including developers, businesses, and users, come together to decide where Drupal is headed, learn from each other, and meet each other in person.
Stephanie presented in three different conference sessions. She co-led the presentation "Theming with Fusion: a new approach for layout and modular styles"; she shared her experience running a Drupal-based business in a panel discussion on "Monetizing Drupal"; and she was a co-presenter in the session "Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) for Drupal".
Stephanie fell in love with Drupal in 2005 as a way to create powerful websites without coding. Her background in both design and web development were nicely bridged with this emerging field of "theming" — pulling together the visual design with the underlying functionality. Her I School education has been a major resource when wearing the many hats of running a young small business.
After joining CivicActions in 2007 and theming a number of high-profile Drupal sites, Stephanie co-founded TopNotchThemes to provide high-quality, flexible Drupal themes to a larger group of site owners.
After several years in the Drupal open-source community, Stephanie began considering graduate school several years ago, looking for a "more comprehensive" education, she explains, "to back up my more seat-of-the-pants approach to life." She was drawn to the School of Information; for one thing, "it was a small thing, but it was appealing to me that the I School site ran Drupal.... I've gone on to take classes like 'Commons-Based Peer Production' and 'Mixing and Remixing Information'. I knew that this would be a supportive community."
Stephanie's experience at the I School has given her new skills and perspectives as a business owner. "Working with really smart and inspiring people has changed how I look for people as a business owner," she says. "I see more in people."
In addition, she has found that an I School degree opens doors and gives her work a "stamp of legitimacy". "I've learned how to do research better and how to formulate an argument better," she says, and the MIMS degree "enables me to do more risky and forward-thinking things."
