WPI Projects
At WPI, the graduation requirements for every student include three projects: a humanities project called the sufficiency; the Interactive Qualifying Project (IQP); and one Major Qualifying Project (MQP) per major. To non-WPI people, the latter two projects are often referred to as junior and senior theses.
- Modern Journalism at the Sentinel & Enterprise, Leominster/Fitchburg, Mass.
- I performed my sufficiency in the form of an internship at the Sentinel & Enterprise, a daily newspaper that serves my hometown community of Leominster. I covered local town beats and did some pagination.
- Smoke Alarm Brochure Design Using Visual Communication
- Scientific Services Laboratory (Melbourne, Australia) commissioned a project for the design of a smoke alarm informational brochure. The intended audience was the illiterate and people whose first language is not English, who may not feel existing alarms are accessible to them due to the complex, written instructions. Surveys and discussions with people with poor language skills was key in generating ideas for manual design, then testing the manual with those people to develop improvements for the design and implementation of the product.
- Moral Panics Over Youth Culture and Video Games
- Moral panics occur when media and society link youth culture to juvenile delinquency, as video games were to the 1999 Columbine shootings. In all moral panics, patterns emerge of how the media chooses to portray what society finds threatening, and what the panics mean in a larger societal context. This paper analyzes video games as a modern moral panic by examining rock 'n roll, comic books, and Dungeons and Dragons as historical moral panics.
- Writing on Writing: A Protean Portfolio
- Writing is not a single skill, as it encompasses many talents and styles. This portfolio presents one author's recent writings, representing a variety of formats, topics, audiences, and skills that include composition, editing, management, and layout. The writing samples are categorized and analyzed, showing that, rather than existing in their own context, this portfolio's content and styles demonstrate, reaffirm, and occasionally challenge the philosophies of Zinsser, Strunk, Bruffee, Stanislavski, and other communication theorists. [Due to copyright concerns, only the first 18 pages of this 136-page document are available at the link above.]
WPI Groups
I was proud to be a member of the WPI Men's Glee Club, the second oldest college men's choir in the country – impressive for a tech school. We sang with other colleges throughout New England, as well as in the Czech Republic and Ireland. I greatly enjoyed the opportunity to practice comedic writing my junior year as the club's secretary, and lost a few pounds trying to get everything done as the president my next year, which was also the group's 34th and final year under the directorship of Prof. Louis Curran. We had some MP3 recordings of our music online, but the server is constantly up-then-down. I did a bit of writing for the school paper, Tech News, but not much.
I was also a tutor in the Writing Workshop, which was a fun and difficult experience I hadn't expected to be a part of. When I had to skip the last day of an English class to attend KansasFest, I had the teacher's permission – only if I joined her crew of tutors. Doh!
WPI Friends
Most of my friends I met at WPI through various organizations I joined. During my last term at WPI, I realized I'd not taken any pictures of my college experience, except when abroad (see travel for that). So I grabbed a camera and, for seven weeks, took pictures of friends and events. Click here to see my pictures from WPI.
High School
I attended St. Bernard's High School in Fitchburg, Mass. I was the original author of their web page, and much of the design remained in their revamps until they moved to their current site. The following is a set of side-by-side comparisons of ancient Greek passages in English, and how I translated the original Greek to English as homework assignments. You can see that my grasp of the language was more comical than accurate.
A great big thanks to Karen Roy, one of the most enjoyable teachers I ever had, wherever she is today.