[Sigia-l] Dreaming of a career in IA: Any advice welcome!

[Dan Saffer]

I definately wouldn't limit yourself to looking at only MLIS programs unless
you want to focus deeply on the management and creation of things like
taxonomies, thesauri, indexing, etc. Otherwise, you do yourself a disservice
by excluding the good HCI and Interaction Design programs out there.

Here's a decent list of them:

http://www.hcibib.org/education/

Shameless plug: I've started to document my own persuit of a master's degree
in interaction design at CMU. You can follow my exploits and see if it is
something you'd like to persue:

http://www.odannyboy.com/blog/cmu

As far as what you need to know, I'm a firm believer in that you need to
know the medium you're going to work in to be able to work there well. I
don't think this necessarily means you need to be a programmer, visual
designer, or a developer, but you need to know what is possible and how to
talk to the people who will build what you dream up. The job requires an
understanding of technology, visual design, usability, research, etc. etc.
But any decent school should give you a background in those things as well.

Also any decent school is going to help you find a job after school with the
credentials you'll have. Definately ask where their graduates have gone off
to work after getting their degrees! I interviewed at big name tech school
where the head of the HCI department could barely name two places where
their alumni had gone to.

Good luck!

Dan Saffer
M.Des. Candidate, Interaction Design
Carnegie Mellon University
dan at odannyboy.com
http://www.odannyboy.com