On Saturday, May 14, friends and family gathered at the Campanile Esplanade to celebrate this year’s graduates of the UC Berkeley School of Information. The class of 2011 included 38 master’s degrees and one doctoral degree.
Dean AnnaLee Saxenian welcomed the audience and introduced the commencement speaker Reid Hoffman, the co-founder and former CEO of LinkedIn and founding board member and former executive vice-president of PayPal.
Hoffman’s speech drew on his experience as an entrepreneur, as he challenged the 2011 graduates to consider how to “be the entrepreneur of your own life.” An entrepreneur succeeds both by being contrarian and by being right, he said. He also challenged the graduates not just to take risks, but to “take intelligent risks.”
Graduating master’s students Thomas Schluchter and Jess Hemerly offered their perspective of their time at the I School. Hemerly began tongue-in-cheek, by thanking her classmates for choosing them to speak. “Thank you for adding yet another task to the seemingly never-ending pile of stuff we have to do. We really really really really appreciate it.”
After their attempt to crowdsource a definition of a “school of information” came up short, they concluded that “nobody knows what a school of information is.” “That's actually a good thing,” Schluchter observed. “That means that each of us can tell people our own story; it means that we can tell people what we are passionate about.”
Finally, the two expressed how much they will miss their classmates — a class that includes “cribbage and cricket players; photo-hobbists and rock climbers; West Coasters, East Coasters, Far-East Coasters; writers, painters, and pop-culture junkies.”
Doctoral student speaker David Thaw spoke about the circuitous path that brought him the school’s doctoral program. “When I first came to Berkeley, I was a political science Ph.D. student,” he explained, but he ended up with a Ph.D. from the School of Information and a J.D. from the Berkeley Law School. “Students come to the I School not just to get a degree, but because they have an interest in something they feel matters,” he said. “And they want to study that interest so they can change the world.”
The commencement ceremony also presented an opportunity to honor both faculty and student achievements. On behalf of the Information Management Student Association, first-year students Prayag Narula and Monica Rosenberg presented awards to two faculty members: professor John Chuang received the I School Distinguished Teaching Award, and adjunct professor Bob Glushko received the Distinguished Mentor Award.
Dean Saxenian presented the 2011 Dr. James R. Chen Awards for outstanding master's final projects to the projects Heart-Focus Game Development for Kids, NextDrop, and Making Metadata: The Case of MusicBrainz. Following the ceremony, graduates, friends, and family enjoyed a festive reception on the South Hall lawn.
