Currently, I hold a Master’s of Science in Information Sciences and Technology and a Bachelor’s of Science in Electrical Engineering with a Minor in Business. Both degrees were awarded by The Pennsylvania State University.
I completed my undergraduate degree in 2008. During that time, I worked as a consultant at one of the ITS Help Desks, a position which would eventually present me with the opportunity to attend graduate school. Sometime during the fall semester of my senior year, my supervisor asked me if I had any interest in graduate school as the Help Desk’s current night supervisor’s assistantship was completing.
In the fall of 2008, I entered the graduate program at the College of Information Sciences and Technology and in August 2010, I left with a Master’s degree. In my time at IST, I briefly worked with Bernie Zang and my advisor, Dr. Mary Beth Rosson, on researching End User Programming and with Dr. Steve Haynes on RAMPART, a Flex/Java/Axis decision support system designed to assist in resource allocation for anti-terrorism projects. My thesis was entitled The Insight Project: Serverless Synchronization of Data for Personal Information Management Software. The thesis covered the limitations the general public experience with PIM software, the benefits of enterprise-grade PIM software (e.g. Outlook + Exchange), and my development of The Insight Project. The Insight Project, as it existed when I wrote my thesis, was a proof of concept project that proved that PI sharing and synchronization can be done in a largely peer-to-peer setting without the need of an enterprise grade server installation. Since defending my thesis, I’ve been taking Insight from proof-of-concept to releasable software and hope to have a release sometime in the next few months. Further information on Insight can be found here at ianwremmel.com.
Since graduating, I’ve been decompressing, traveling, and visiting friends and family, but now, it’s time to start a career. I intend to have found a position by December 1st 2010. Ideally, I’d like to move to the Boston area, but I’m open to a number of possibilities. Six months ago, I would have said I wanted a position as a C++ developer doing application development of communications software (e.g. an email client, instant messenger, or some such program that helps people connect and communication). Over the last few months, however, I’ve done some web development for Conceptual Symmetry and I’ve found I rather enjoy it. I’ve always said I don’t want to work on anything classified because I want to be able to talk about what I’m doing and I want to work on something that people with see or use. Web development definitely hits all of those requirements. At this point, I’d say I’m open to either type of job but I’m leaning toward web development. In the long run, I intend to open a small software/web development and design company.