Are you an international student? Do you struggle to use slang in social contexts? Well, then Slang Central, the app that teaches you American slang, is for you.

What I just pitched is not a “real” app. It’s not available in the app store, has no backend development, and is only stored in Figma – an online application that allows users to create high-fidelity user interfaces. But, it is a “real” app in the sense that it has a comprehensive design that my team thoroughly researched and created in the Cornell University course INFO 3450/5355/COMM 3450: Human-Computer Interaction Design.

The class, taught by Gilly Leshed, senior lecturer of information science in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, teaches students how to design their own apps to address problems for particular user groups. 

Through this class – which counts as an elective for my user experience (UX) concentration within the information science major – I learned how to apply principles of UX/usability, how to conduct proper user research, how to create a paper prototype, and how to use Figma. 

I joined this class with budding skills in UX research and Figma that I gained from my 2024 summer internship at Bank of Montreal. After spending many hours prototyping, designing, interviewing, researching, and compiling information with my group, I feel that my skills have fully blossomed and that I am prepared to begin a career in UX. 

Selin Toker ’26, my fellow group member, reflected on her own positive experiences in the class.

“Human-Computer Interaction Design was one of my favorite classes at Cornell because it allowed me to challenge myself creatively through a semester-long project that I really enjoyed,” Toker said.

All of our work culminated in a poster session in Baker Portico in the Physical Sciences Building on Tuesday, Dec. 10. My group presented our app, Slang Central, alongside our INFO 3450 classmates as well as our peers in INFO 4420/6520: Human Computer Interaction Studio. Via the help of many Cornell students who served as our user group, we designed an app that allows international students to store, learn, and practice  American slang in social settings. It is our hope that our app design will be able to help international students make and maintain friendships.

Nicole Cheung ’25, my other group member, said that the poster session was an opportunity for her to view the payoff of her peers’ hard work.

“It was really fun to see all the interesting ideas come to life,” Cheung said.

Likewise, I loved watching my classmates display their work. From an app that helps Black students find hair braiders to a platform that assists Cornell students in completing rigorous club applications, the passion and technical skills of my peers were evident and remarkable to experience.

Toker also enjoyed the poster session, saying it gave her insight into her peers’ creativity.

“[The poster session] gave me the opportunity to explore my classmates' creative and unique designs and see the projects they had been working on throughout the semester,” Toker said.

By Dina Shlufman ’27, a student writer for the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science. 

The Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science would like to congratulate our December 2025 graduates and wish them well as they embark on their next steps. From conducting research to joining project teams and serving as teaching staff in Bowers classes, our students have accomplished remarkable things. Here’s what some of them had to say about their Cornell experiences.

Just one year out, Kendall Hoffman ’23, MPS ’23, already sees how her education in the Master of Professional Studies program in information science informs her work as a product manager. 

“Being in this role and directly applying what I learned in college and grad school has been really cool,” she said.

Hoffman's "role” is within the federal workforce. In August, she was named one of 70 U.S. Digital Corps Fellows chosen from more than 2,000 applicants nationwide. Launched by the Biden-Harris Administration in 2021 and administered by the U.S. General Services Administration, the two-year fellowship is awarded to early-career technologists and intended as a pathway to careers in priority areas within the federal government, namely artificial intelligence, public health, and cybersecurity. Hoffman works as a product manager supporting a team within the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) that has developed a free, publicly available tool called Logging Made Easy. It allows smaller organizations to monitor networks, identify users, and strengthen their cybersecurity.

“The tool is a first line of defense for companies or small organizations who maybe have zero cybersecurity posture. It’s completely free and open-source,” she said. “Before I joined, the team was very technically focused, so I'm helping to bring a lot of user-centered design principles to the team.”

The prospect of a career in tech would’ve perhaps puzzled Hoffman as a high school student in Ossining, NY. Back then, she’d sworn off coding and most anything adjacent to computer science after taking an AP computer science course she called “probably the least favorite class I’d ever taken.”

“I told myself I was never doing that again,” she said.

Hoffman arrived at Cornell as an environment and sustainability major. Then COVID-19 hit in the second semester of her first year. 

“I think that led to a lot of introspection and reflection on what I was doing,” she said. 

Continuing her education virtually, Hoffman ended up taking a statistics class in R, a programming language for statistical computing, and liked it so much she got curious about other technical skills that could prove valuable upon graduation. She gave coding another try, took a Python course, and did well. By venturing further into offerings within the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, she discovered the information science major. 

Information science’s “open-ended” nature appealed to Hoffman. She could take traditional tech-oriented courses, like coding, and a variety of others, all while incorporating her interest in clean technology and sustainability. She opted to double major in information science as well as environment and sustainability.

In the latter half of her senior year, Hoffman enrolled in the Department of Information Science’s MPS early credit option, which allows seniors to take MPS-level courses and work toward their MPS degree as undergraduates. Whereas the MPS program traditionally takes two or three semesters to complete, students taking the early credit option need only an additional semester beyond their undergraduate years to complete the MPS program, saving a semester of tuition in the process. 

“I wanted to build onto that undergrad experience, enrich it, and deepen it a lot more,” she said. “It was really appealing to me.”

Hoffman liked that the MPS program wasn’t purely about bolstering technical skills. She learned user-experience design principles, too, and how to create tools that are accessible and usable – skills that have proved critical thus far in her current role as product manager.

"That education is being used in my job every day and has helped me develop and improve the Logging Made Easy product in ways that support the broader CISA organization, but also users,” she said.

For her MPS project – the program’s linchpin course where students work with client companies to build solutions for real problems – Hoffman served as project manager on a student team that worked with Microsoft mentors to build a university course registration system using Microsoft Azure’s cloud services. That hands-on experience in working with cross-functional teams to solve real-world problems is one of the most valuable aspects of the program, she said.

“That hands-on focus was not unique to the MPS project course. It was a feature of other courses too. Almost every single class had a class project,” she said. “I took very few exams. The program’s emphasis on the application of what we were learning – not just the memory recall of concepts – was super useful for me and the way that I learn.”

Was the MPS worth it?

“Absolutely. It tied up the loose ends that I had from undergrad,” she said. “It gave me such a good foundation for seeing how teams get things done, which has a direct application in my job now.”

Louis DiPietro is a writer for the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.

Critics of affirmative action in higher education have argued that the policy deprives more qualified students of a spot at a university or college. A new study by Cornell researchers finds that ignoring race leads to an admitted class that is much less diverse, but with similar academic credentials.

In the six months leading up to his graduation from the Department of Information Science’s Master of Professional Studies (MPS) program, Matthew Roohan ’23, MPS’ 24, took networking to an admittedly absurd and caffeinated extreme. 

By his count, he logged close to 300 “coffee chats” with Cornell alumni and industry professionals he connected with on LinkedIn and Handshake, a platform that connects employers with college students – or met at career fairs. The chats, mostly remote, were roughly 30 minutes apiece. That’s at least one meeting per day – weekends included – and assuming one cup per chat, that puts his coffee consumption during that time just south of 19 gallons.

“It was an absolutely absurd amount of chats with a wide array of alumni working in the food service industry, big tech, finance, consulting, and others. I’d talk to one person who’d encourage me to talk to another person, and that kind of had a domino effect,” said Roohan, a native of East Greenbush, New York, outside of Albany. “The chats were not just to try to find a job but to figure out exactly what kind of role I was looking for.”

He discovered both. Roohan officially landed a job on June 1, one week after graduation. Today, he’s a biotech management consultant for Qral Group, a life sciences consulting firm that specializes in supporting pharmaceutical and biotech companies to bring innovative treatments to market. Qral assists companies in areas such as market entry strategies, business implementation, and information management, with a focus on impactful therapies, including those for rare diseases. Based in New York City, Roohan’s role is on the data analytics team, poring over health care data to help clients identify potential markets and strategies for optimized success. 

How did the MPS program prepare him for success in industry? First, “the faculty,” he said. “I was able to connect with faculty on a more personal level. That was key for me.” 

“The MPS program stands out due to being very hands-on, giving its students special opportunities to work closely with real clients on projects that have an immediate and real-world impact,” he said. “This experience applies across several industries, most importantly as technology continues to transform many fields. Lastly, personally, it's hard not to love studying in Ithaca, as Cornell's beautiful campus and surrounding nature create an inspiring atmosphere to learn and grow together.”

In his undergraduate studies at Cornell, Roohan majored in animal science and discovered information science during his junior year. “Way too late to completely change majors,” he said, “so I tried to take as many information science classes as I could.” He ultimately completed minors in information science and business. 

Consecutive summer internships doing data analytics for a health care company in upstate New York showed Roohan how the life sciences, data analytics, and business can overlap in industry. After earning his bachelor’s, he opted to stick around Cornell for another year and pursue an MPS in information science, with a concentration in data science. 

“I loved the information science program from the classes I took in undergrad, and I was close with Gilly [Leshed, MPS director], who encouraged me to come back,” he said. “It was a perfect fit and something I really wanted to do.”

During his two semesters in the MPS program, Roohan chipped away at his course work and served as a teaching assistant in Leshed’s Human-Computer Interaction Design course (INFO 3450/5255). For his MPS Project, Roohan collaborated with the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business MBA students via the Digital Technology Immersion. The team of four students developed a go-to-market strategy for Capital One’s authorized user system to help improve financial literacy among teens and college students.

His job search got rolling in November, which is just past the typical recruiting months for the consulting industry, he said.

“But I was able to find ways to overcome this disadvantage by utilizing networking,” Roohan said. 

Thus began his networking blitz. For career help, he leaned heavily on Rebecca Salk, MPS career services advisor and “a gamechanger” who helped him tweak his resume and cover letters, and practice for job interviews.

“The job search process is already so stressful. When you're balancing classes, coffee chats, and interview prep, it can all be overwhelming,” he said. Having a dedicated staffer like Salk to help with job readiness proved critical, he said.

“Honestly, I feel so bad for how much time I took from her,” he joked.

To new and prospective MPS students, Roohan encouraged them to take advantage of all that Cornell has to offer – from world-renowned faculty and a rich alumni network to student clubs and career resources.

“Looking back, the time in the MPS program flies by. Use your time to truly know faculty [and] your peers, and form relationships that you'll use the rest of your life,” he said. “These connections I've made have been invaluable, and I'm extremely grateful to have such inspiring, world-changing people in my network.”

New and current MPS students with questions about networking or other aspects of the MPS program are encouraged to get in touch with Matthew via LinkedIn.

By Louis DiPietro, a writer for the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.

Social virtual reality games and apps such as VRChat, AltspaceVR and Rec Room are immersive 3D experiences that let people with disabilities – both visible and invisible – try activities that might not be available to them in the non-virtual world.

In those settings, Cornell researchers have found, the decision to disclose an invisible disability – a physical, mental or neurological condition that is not visible from the outside but can limit or challenge a person’s movements, senses or activities – is personal.

Cornell researchers developed a more equitable method for choosing top candidates from a large applicant pool in cases where insufficient information makes it hard to choose.

Researchers in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science trained a large language model (LLM) to identify the monologic voice – used in an attempt to affirm one’s legitimacy, monologue style – including its collective and individualistic tones, in eight decades’ worth of U.S. Supreme Court opinions.

The news of a proper Buddhist funeral being held in Japan for more than 100 defunct robotic dogs initially struck Waki Kamino as odd.

But after a summer spent in Tokyo conducting hundreds of interviews with owners of social robots, Kamino – a doctoral student in the field of information science and a robotics researcher – came to understand the emotional and practical aspects of the funeral itself. She also happened upon a central premise in her latest research: a social robot’s death can inform its design.

All students in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science have ambitious dreams for their future, but some of those dreams take a little extra help to come true. That's where the Dream Grants program comes in. 

Each semester, students from across the college can receive up to $1,000 to advance their dream, whether they want to develop an app, found a startup, present their research at a conference – or something entirely new.

Established by alumni Parag Tole, M.S. ’01, Ph.D. ‘03, and Adam Kravetz ’02, the Dream Grant fund is designed to "help students walk their own paths." Students can apply each semester through the Cornell Bowers CIS Student Services office, with the next application window opening in Spring 2024.