<aside> ✨ Darren Butler is a first-year HCII PhD student with an emphasis in Learning Science and Technology. Through HCI, he is able to combine his interests in STEM Education, Cognitive Science, and Computer Science to make technology more accessible to communities in need. His experience extends also to venture capital and entrepreneurship.
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Right now, I’m a first-year PhD student in the Human Computer Interaction institute, and my emphasis there is in Learning Science and Technology. I started exploring academia from a research experience that I did in my freshman year of my undergrad at Philander College, where I was studying Computer Science. That research experience was looking into how we could better design auto-grading tools for teachers and computer science instructors to adopt into their work. That inspired me, along with my pre-existing passion for education, to delve deeper into education technology. I’ve also always been very interested in sustainable development goals, so I went on to do more other projects and engage with organizations that combine those things—I’ve worked with STEM education nonprofits and Google developer groups, as well as attended pitch competitions to create technology for education. Those are the arrays of things that lead me to be interested in Education Technology.
My path to CMU was mostly about understanding my own passion for this area. My questions not only for how we can better design education technology but also how we can make creating technology more accessible for people who are from regions and cultures where technology isn’t the mainstream(that’s also linked to my personal background, I’m from the Bahamas and I came to the US to attend college). I thought that pursuing graduate school would give me the freedom to explore that. I found CMU at the Tapia Conference, I applied, and so here I am.
I was onboarded to two pre-existing projects. One is the second-phase of a Learning Engineering and Education project. I’m working with a company that is doing a remote STEM education course for learners in rural Uganda using radio broadcasts and an array of low-tech messaging. I am helping perform data analysis on the responses from the learners to better understand how we can develop the course, as well as the impact the course is having on different demographics and how feasible something like this is for other contexts. The other project I’m working with is similar—it is exploring Education Technology in the context of an emerging economy. I’m working on developing a dashboard that can show data being gathered by an application used by NGO workers and teachers. The larger picture is a part of another PhD student’s dissertation looking at how community-based design can support teachers and their aspirations.
I was inspired to do HCI by a desire to expand access to education. Rather than core education theory alone, like studying cognitively how people understand concepts, I am more interested in how we can create mechanisms to deliver interventions that have already been proven to be successful. Beyond education, I’m interested in a specific part of education—STEM education and technology education. HCI and how interdisciplinary it is let me pull from things in education, things from computer science, things from the social sciences, to create novel interventions that make education more accessible and easier to customize to certain populations.
If you told me I was going to do a PhD when I was a senior in high school, I would’ve looked at you like you were crazy. The “aha” moment build up over time as I got more exposure to academia. In my first research experience, I was reviewing the work of a professor in the University of Delaware. We actually had a lot in common, and I thought about education a lot throughout my own journey and how impactful it is for people to be able to access tools and skills to create what they need for themselves and their communities. Especially after the research experience, grad school definitely seemed like more of a possibility. When I got to my junior year, I did research and an internship at Deloitte, and after all those experiences I just found that academia was more fulfilling since I get to explore more of what I’m interested in. I figured that academia was more flexible, and it felt like more freedom. After grad school, I’ll probably go into the industry since I’ve gotten to know more of how education comes into the industry—building education technology, corporate consulting for education, or corporate training.
I understand the industry a little more from my experiences in academia, mainly from seeing how other people use their academic background in industry roles. One of the new professors, Andrew Begel, just came from Microsoft to join the Institute of Software Research. In the Google research mentorship program, I was also interacting with a researcher from Google. I’ve also seen a lot of academic entrepreneurship too. Through conversations with the people around me, I’ve gotten to learn more about the link between academia and industry. These things can all be very tightly linked and you can be anywhere you want.
I did my undergrad in Philander Smith College in Little Rock, Arkansas, which is very different from Pittsburgh. The South in general was very different. My college was very small and had less than a thousand students, and CMU is definitely larger. The main difference is that CMU and Philander College have very different histories. Philander is a Historically Black College/University(HBCU), and while there aren’t any HBCU-type traditions happening here, I feel that I can still find community through organizations like the Black Graduate Student Organization. I can get those small doses by connecting with different people. I won’t say either is better—it’s just different. They both play a critical role in my journey.