Name: Ethan Hanner
Hometown: Saint Matthews, SC
Advisor: Jed R. Brubaker (Identity Lab)
My Path to Engineering
I grew up in a very rural part of South Carolina, in a house surrounded by cotton fields and corn fields in every direction. So, for me, going into the field of computing was never a given, or really even on my radar for most of my childhood and teenage years. I had no clue that there were degree programs and careers in computer science. I only had the faintest idea of what web design was.
Then I graduated high school, and suddenly I was faced with a decision to make about what I wanted to major in in college, and ultimately what I wanted to “do with my life.” As a teenager, I’d played around a bit with video editing and making home movies … I didn’t exactly think I had the talent to make it big in Hollywood, but when I found a college where I could double major in psychology (a subject that had always been interesting to me, but that my schools had never offered any courses in) and film, that seemed pretty exciting.
I enjoyed my first two semesters of classes, and things seemed to be going fine … but I was still struggling with the question of what I wanted to do after college. Then, in my first semester of sophomore year, I enrolled in an introductory programming class that was meant to fulfill a general education requirement for quantitative analysis. In that class, the teacher taught us the basics of writing and compiling Java code. I was hooked. The next semester, I transferred to a school back in South Carolina, Winthrop University, that had a full computer science program, and I never looked back.
Going to graduate school wasn’t something I considered early on. Then one day I came across an email blast in my campus inbox about the McNair Scholars Program at Winthrop, a federally funded program designed to help first-generation, low-income students and underrepresented minorities get into graduate programs (and succeed in them!). I matched the former criteria and so was included on the email blast, I applied, and I got in!
Participating in McNair introduced to conferences and journals in my field and learned about areas of computer science like human-centered computing and information science that I’d never imagined before. Most importantly, participating in McNair gave me the experience and the confidence to see myself as a researcher, and imagine myself being successful as a researcher in a PhD program. In my final year at Winthrop, I submitted applications to a few different computer science programs, particularly ones that offered a focus on human-centered computing. I had finally found a way to combine my love of computers and my interest in human behavior and psychology into one.
Why CU Boulder?
I was fortunate enough to be accepted into a few different programs, and to have an opportunity to visit many of those to meet with faculty and current students. While I enjoyed each visit, none of them stuck with me like my visit to Boulder. I loved everything about the campus, the people I met here, and the work that I saw happening here. I was looking for a big change in my life and moving across the country from South Carolina to Colorado to study social issues and technology seemed like it would accomplish that. Something felt right about CU, and I’m glad I chose it.
Now I work in the Identity Lab at CU Boulder with Dr. Jed R. Brubaker, looking at the way that computing and information technology impact society and vice versa. In my lab, we have ongoing projects about grief in online social spaces, managing gender transitions across multiple social media platforms, and engaging in protest and activism online – just to name a few!
My favorite things about CU are a lot of the things that drew me to come here in the first place – for one, Boulder is an incredibly beautiful place to live and work and that beauty is available everywhere you look on campus. I also have developed really close relationships with the faculty in the department and in my lab, and with my peers in the computer science and information science programs. I appreciate the incredible opportunities that I’m given through connections that the faculty at CU have with industry and with other universities, and the collaborations that are happening every single day. Sometimes I am overwhelmed by all the different and interesting work going on here, and sad that I can’t be a part of all of it at one time! But I think that is a good problem for a program to have – because it means there’s a place for almost anyone.