When he was in high school, he was the president of the Computer Science Club, and when he arrived at Rutgers New-Brunswick as a freshman, he planned to major either in pre-med or Computer Science. But that was before he learned about the Information Technology and Informatics major at SC&I. Today, rising senior Kwaku Ampadu-Nyarkoh said he realizes that the ITI major has offered him the academic path he intended to be on all along.
Below, SC&I speaks with Ampadu-Nyarkoh about why he chose to major in ITI, how the knowledge he has gained helped him last summer when he was a Cloud/DevOps Engineer intern at Twitch in San Francisco, as well as when he worked as a Community Health Organizer for the New Jersey Department of Health during the COVID-19 pandemic.
He also discusses his post-graduation career goals, and why he is determined to always support Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives wherever he works.
SC&I: What are some of the reasons you decided to major in ITI, instead of Computer Science?
KA-N: When I was a freshman, I was looking at pre-med and Computer Science, but then I had some difficulties with some of the classes as I went along – in both math and Computer Science, so I had to reevaluate if I wanted to do Computer Science anymore.
A lot of kids coming out of Computer Science get into ITI. It’s another field/major that is comparable to Computer Science, but the way I look at it is that ITI is more about concepts that concern people. ITI explores how humans interact with technology and the consequences of technology.
There is also a programming aspect to ITI in the object-oriented programming course. Learning how humans interact with technology has resonated with me more than just sitting at a screen and coding, because being in ITI has enabled me to focus on very interesting projects that relate to human beings.
For example, in the Data Management and Data Curation course I learned about how humans interact with data and how the curation of data can affect people’s lives. I think it’s a very important major for this reason. In another class, I worked on a project analyzing how sentiment on Twitter, related to tweets about COVID-19 death counts, varied by state. I analyzed the sentiment or the emotion of those tweets which involves complicated theories about linguistics. I used online Python packages to analyze the text to determine whether a piece of text was positive, negative, or neutral emotion. The idea of the project was to see if geographical areas with higher positive tweet sentiment counts had lower death rates from COVID, and if states or cities with a higher negative sentiment Tweet count experienced higher death rates. This was a very interesting project and I got to apply technical aspects of the Python packages I was using. I don’t think I would have gotten that kind of perspective had I been in Computer Science.
SC&I: What was it like interning for Twitch in San Francisco last summer?
KA-N: I took an ITI course, Network Security, and I learned concepts in the class that I never thought would come up again until I went to work for Twitch. At Twitch I was a cloud/DevOps engineer, pretty much the same as a network engineer. I took that class my sophomore year, so I was surprised that I even remembered some of those concepts. There were some organizational concepts that helped me adapt to the office environment I was in. There were times where I thought about ITI concepts when I was thinking about building things, such as the customer – the human who will be interacting with the service. I can’t describe exactly what I was working on because I signed a non-disclosure agreement, but that was a significant concept that I was able to apply. It just shows we never know when something we’ve learned in class will come in handy!
SC&I: What are your career goals after college?
KA-N: I really liked working at Twitch and I am considering the DevOps or cloud engineering fields. What interests me primarily is cloud technology. There are so many customers, and each customer wants and needs a different type of cloud environment. While I was working in that field, I felt I was getting continuous feedback about what people wanted to see in cloud products.
SC&I: Which ITI classes have you enjoyed the most and why?
KA-N: Dr. Warren Allen’s Object Oriented Programming class was really cool and I learned a lot, especially about coding. I learned so much in a short amount of time and that was during COVID. That was one of my favorite courses at Rutgers. He gave me the opportunity to work with Linux stuff, particularly a tool called Ansible. That came in handy when I interviewed for the internship at Twitch and worked for Twitch. It really made me see that those skills were meaningful. That’s what’s cool about Dr. Warren Allen and ITI. [Editor’s note: Allen is director of undergraduate studies in Information Technology and Informatics and assistant teaching professor.]
SC&I: What do you think are some of the differences between majoring in ITI and Computer Science?
KA-N: In job or internship interviews, when the interviewer(s) ask about the customer, an ITI student can answer that question a bit better than a Computer Science student would. Perhaps ITI students might not have the best technical buildup of the process, but ITI students definitely think about how the customer is interacting with the technology and take into account all of the affordances and minor things we take for granted when building technology. A lot of the ‘tech bros,’ as they are called, are very enthusiastic about what they are making – but sometimes they are enthusiastic because they are making it and they are not taking into account the lives they are affecting.
When I was at Twitch, I met Canadian interns from the University of Waterloo and they told me about the ‘Engineers Ring’ they will get when they graduate. There was a bridge accident in Canada near this university where a lot of people lost their lives. The university takes metal from the bridge and turns it into pinky rings that engineers are given when they graduate. When they are about to work, they put their pinky on the table and look at the ring, to remind themselves that what they make has real-world consequences.
There are programs out there where students are reminded that they are not always going to be students – they are going into the world, and they are going to impact other people’s lives. There is a comfort in being a student then suddenly you are a professional making an impact. So being aware of yourself, how you interact with your environment, and impact others is very important, and ITI definitely has that edge over Computer Science.
SC&I: The ITI major requires students to have a minor. What are you minoring in and how does your minor support both what you are learning in ITI courses and what you work on during your internships and jobs?
KA-N: I decided to minor in public health, specifically Health Care Administration, because I wanted to do Health IT, and work with patient medical records being transitioned to electronic medical records.
From May 2021 until February 2022, I worked as a Community Health Organizer for the New Jersey Department of Health, which kind of combined my major and minor. The job involved data entry and going door-to-door with a phone app called ‘Minivan,’ a canvassing app, to ask people if they were vaccinated and if not to help them get vaccinated.
We had to hit a minimum of 100 houses a day, and I always reached the quota. But when you visit 100 houses a day you meet 100 plus different personalities. Some were hostile, very, very hostile about the vaccine, and wondered why I had their information on my phone (or on the app), and others were inquisitive about the vaccine, genuinely curious not knowing much about it, and eager, and they end up getting the vaccine after we talked.
Working this covid-canvassing job I was in different neighborhoods sometimes in the same day. These neighborhoods would drastically differ in terms of what they looked like. I went to a place in Morristown, a rich area next to a country club. While walking door to door one of the questions we asked was ‘do you need any governmental assistance.’ One guy stopped, looked around, and said, ‘I don’t think anybody here needs that.’ He chuckled and walked away happy, and I thought, that’s true, but we still have to be here, it’s mandatory. Then we went to another place in South Jersey that was pretty beat up. There the local residents feel like they are being overlooked, and that they don’t have enough opportunity. One woman was happy her kid got into college and got away from that area.
I had moments where I’d go to someone’s house and offer pamphlets and tell them they can go to the website for more information, and they would tell me they did not have a phone or a computer. What could I do in that situation? It is so difficult in some areas for people to get information. These people end up being like ghosts because of lack of information due a lack of technology.
Based on these experiences, do you think you will be even more committed to pursuing DEI initiatives wherever you work?
KA-N: Definitely. Going around and speaking with people, asking how they are and how they have been dealing with COVID, and they tell you everything they’ve been dealing with in terms of getting proper healthcare, being able to pay the bills, and certain other struggles they’ve had in their lives, makes you ask, how could we have this large geographical area where there are so many people who are struggling, and then immediately next door there is a very, very well off area?
There will always be inequalities in society but when they drastically differ, we have to ask why that’s the case. What is going on? Having gone through that and seeing the different sides of opportunity, I would say DEI is something I am going to push for wherever I am working.
Discover more about the Information Technology and Informatics major on the Rutgers School of Communication and Information website.
Photo: Courtesy of Kwaku Ampadu-Nyarkoh
