Last summer, LSA Technology Services hosted an intern through the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP) Community College Summer Fellowship Program. UROP provides valuable opportunities for students to develop their research skills. Mya Kim worked on a digital research project through the program as a student at Henry Ford College.
Kim had three goals she set out to achieve at the start of the program. The first was to develop communication skills in a professional and team setting. As part of the internship, she worked with many members of LSA Technology Services, but worked the closest with Joe Bauer, Digital Scholarship Research Consultant. Kim said he was “very adamant about making sure my goals were met.” With Bauer’s help, she was mentored by many other staff members in the department, including Kellie Grassman, Digital Accessibility Specialist, Maria Laitan, User Interface Design Engineer, Ruiqi Sun, Web Designer, and Abbey Roelofs, Kevin Murray and Nathan Fallahi, Research Software Programmers. Kim also had the opportunity to enjoy breakfast with the LSA Technology Services Leadership Team, including CIO Cathy Curley and Research Computing and Infrastructure Director Amy Peters, where she learned about their backgrounds and how they came to work at LSA. This experience taught Kim that career paths take unexpected turns, but this does not discourage her. “I’m happy to say I am more confident, not only in the professional world, but in following my own pace as well,” she noted.
The second goal Kim had was to develop transferable skills and make professional connections. The project for the program started as a proof-of-concept to prototype a new kind of exhibit through research. The goal was to create an engaging physical exhibit that educates users about social justice. Through research into 8-bit video games, Kim found that the relationship between representation and character customization through the topics of sexism, racism, and ableism would gain the most attention. This was a joint venture between LSA Technology Services and the DSI with Toni Bushner, DSI Lecturer, as a co-PI of the project. Kim was assigned to work with our department as her work would be technical in nature. Kim described it as “digital scholarship work that’s not simply creating a website or application, but something that could be physically interacted with as well.”
8-bit video games were used as a model for the project in collaboration with the Computer and Video Game Archive (CVGA) and the DSI. The project included making a giant Nintendo controller that was three feet by four feet to force teamwork when playing video games. The first Super Mario Bros. game, which was created for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), was emulated for Nintendo Switches in the DSI’s student lounge. The game was then modified to allow players to play as customizable characters. Hosted by the DSI, “Mario Night” allows students, staff, and faculty to create their own characters that then become playable in the game. “The premise is to try to instigate conversation amongst folks on how they’re representing themselves or if they are representing themselves at all,” explains Bauer, “Mya helped design a lot of user experience.”
The third goal Kim had was to gain UX experience. She initially had little knowledge of the field but wanted to explore the field as a potential career. In support of her goals, Bauer allowed Kim to conduct UX design research that aligned with the project's objectives. She helped discover and document a lot of how people Doneinteracted with these projects in terms of the academic goals of the research project. The research turned the data into tasks that users needed to be able to do. Kim and Bauer worked with programmers and other technicians on how this might look and function in the real world. Bauer has worked with UROP students before on faculty members’ projects, but this was the first project that was held through LSA Technology Services. Even though the project is ongoing, Kim presented a website that showed the project’s journey at the UROP Summer Symposium.
After the program, Kim decided to transfer to the Stamps School of Art and Design to earn a BFA in Art and Design. The DSI was not on Kim’s radar until she started the project, but now she's considering minoring in digital studies through the DSI. She is also grateful to UROP for offering her the opportunity to explore the University of Michigan before applying. Kim gave “a special thank you to Joe Bauer for being the best mentor I could ask for, to Maria Laitan for all her help with UX design, and to the Digital Scholarship team for being so welcoming”. She sees the program as “a positive experience that I’ll reflect on throughout my career and the rest of my life.”
