Featured Undergrads

Katharine comes to MIT from Dallas, Texas and is currently a senior in Comparative Media Studies. After an externship at 20th Century Fox during the Writers Strike, she became interested in the way new media and technologies are changing the way people perceive labor, distribution, and the value of creative work in the media industry. She hopes to better understand the problem by studying the policy, business, and media sides of the problem to help negotiations and aid the transition of new media into an already well-established industry.

Daniel Dahan, native to sunny Los Angeles, California, is currently a sophomore in CMS. Ever since his freshman year in high school, he has been passionately in love with digital animation. He has entered his animations into numerous competitions, including the FIRST Robotics Autodesk Visualization Competition, the Shalhevet Freier Physics Tournament, and more recently, the 11th Annual CMS Media Spectacle. After juggling classes at MIT, Daniel helped found "Exploring 3D Animation", a class hosted by the Student Art Association over IAP that explored various traditional animation principles through several hands on projects. Daniel hopes to explore further opportunities in animation, film, and video game design through CMS programs such as GAMBIT, and classes such as Transmedia Storytelling: Modern Science Fiction. He is an avid fan of Pixar films, and strongly encourages MIT students to see Up if they have not seen it already.

Claxton Everett is pursuing a Bachelors in Comparative Media Studies with a minor in Music. He is also QA Tester and Communications Assistant for the MIT-GAMBIT Lab. (Basically, he's in GAMBIT as much as the lights are.) He enjoys gaming, video editing, online social utilities such as facebook and twitter (perhaps a bit too much), singing, and learning to play new instruments. His current favorites are clarinet and piano, but then again those are the only two instruments he knows how to play. Claxton says, "My classes and endeavors pertaining to CMS have opened my mind on all facets of new media including film, gaming, literature and web-based media networks." An avid and devoted gamer, Claxton plans to work for a game production firm upon graduating in Spring 2010. He also hopes to attend film school in the near future. He attributes his success at MIT to the amazing minds and inspirations he has encountered within CMS faculty, students and mentors.

Jennifer Fu, native of Plano, Texas, is a senior in the Comparative Media Studies program and the Sloan School of Management (with a concentration in marketing). Her track to becoming a CMS major started early as an overly-analytical otaku of Japanese anime and manga; since arriving at the Institute, her CMS-related interests have broadened to fan studies, Web 2.0 advertising and marketing, and game design. She has worked several semesters in the Singapore-MIT Gambit Game Lab as a game designer, programmer, artist, and test lead. She also writes Japanese-style comics in her spare time, which have included a published short story in Tokyopop's Rising Stars of Manga anthology and two doujinshi, or original fan comics, with an MIT-based circle. Recently, she's taken up tweeting and blogging about anime, fans, and the industry as well. Jennifer is currently working on her senior thesis in CMS on anime fanartists in the United States and some of the issues they face, including authenticity, racial prejudices, and questions of intellectual property.

Benjamin Samuel Sender Jones spent his first 18 years in a cozy home in Baltimore, Maryland. His love for games dates back to games of Scrabble and chess played with his grandparents when he was barely out of diapers. During his high school experience at the Friends School of Baltimore, Ben discovered a fascination for black and white photography and film editing, to compliment his passion for games. Although originally interested in MIT for engineering, Ben was drawn to its Comparative Media Studies program, where he is thrilled to explore his long-time hobby and prepare to turn it into a career. Ben is an aspiring game designer who seeks to broaden his experience in both digital and non-digital games.

Ben has worked for the MIT’s GAMBIT Game Lab and Firaxis Games. Through course work and jobs, Ben has developed five games ranging from a time-traveling “tower defense” videogame to a social board game designed to get players interested in wireless mesh networks. In the near future, Ben will continue to work on several independent projects such as a card-game adaption of a popular digital game and a turn-based strategy game for iOS.

Eric Schmiedl was born in Germany, grew up in Seattle, started photographing with his dad's camera at age 12--and has been hooked on photography ever since. He's now a photo editor at MIT's Technique photography club and yearbook, a freelance commercial photographer, a photo assistant, and an MIT student in his free time. He's constantly trying different cameras and types of photography, which sometimes results in beautiful pictures but mostly in amusing stories to tell other photographers at parties. In general, he prefers to eschew the photojournalistic tradition of working with ambient light in favor of obliterating that light with a few thousand watt-seconds of (much more photogenic) studio flash. He can usually be spotted by looking for the guy setting up enough lights to give those in the limelight a serious tan.