help wanted: graduate research assistant

Looks like we'll be receiving our notice of award from NSF in the next week or two, which means it's time to find the third member of our team--the graduate assistant. It's a two-year full-ride assistantship--full tuition for two years, and a $16,000 yearly stipend, in exchange for 20 hours/week of work on the project. It does not include summers, although summer money may also become available. (Keep in mind, too, that this is Rochester, NY, where the cost of living is very low compared to major metro areas.)

This is a two-year grant to study the experiences of women in undergraduate IT programs. Here's how we described it in the proposal abstract:

The proposed research will study the experiences of undergraduate women in departments of Information Technology (IT). Most research to date into women�s experiences in undergraduate computing programs has focused on Computer Science departments. IT programs have cast themselves as qualitatively different from traditional CS. It is unclear, however, whether women�s experiences in these programs are more positive than in CS, where retention of female students has been consistently problematic. This study will be done in two parts. The first will be a qualitative study of women entering the IT department at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) as freshmen. These women will be interviewed upon entrance into the program, at the end of their first quarter, and at the end of the academic year. Based on the information gained in that study, key factors related to women�s persistence or attrition will be identified. The second part of the study will be the development of a questionnaires for faculty and students intended to identify the presence and influence of those factors in academic departments. The questionnaire will then be administered at departments of IT across the US, in order to determine whether the factors identified at RIT are generalizable across institutions.

The qualitative methodology we'll be using in the first portion of the study is Brenda Dervin's Sense-Making, which is what I used in my dissertation research (on attrition in LIS doctoral programs).

What we're looking for in our "ideal" graduate assistant is someone who has a background in social science research, strong writing skills, and good interpersonal skills (to help with interviewing subjects). They'll also need to meet the admissions requirements for the MS IT program--which are not terribly stringent. (3.0 GPA, and basic programming and web skills, essentially.)

In addition to the opportunity to work with two very fun researchers (myself and Tona Henderson) on an interesting NSF grant (and associated publications), you'll get a top-notch technical education. The next two years will be exciting ones in our program as we begin to expand the range of course offerings and focus on targeted areas like game development and social software, and XML.

If you're interested, or know somebody who is, please contact me directly, at ell at mail dot rit dot edu.