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Featured Undergrads
Our undergraduate majors, minors, and concentrators come to us with diverse interests ranging from game development to film. They take an interdisciplinary approach to their education and participate in media-related events and research projects.
Here are a few of the great majors we've featured over the years...
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Zachary Barryte
CMS, Class of 2013
Zachary Barryte has always loved to draw and decided when he was little that he would somehow incorporate art into whatever he decided to do with his life. He developed a love for digital and stop-motion animation and wanted to learn more about how technology could augment art and how art could augment technology. He came to MIT to learn more about this blending of art and decided to major in 21e (humanities and engineering, which probably requires further explanation: it allows the combination of any humanities and any engineering major into a joint major, specifically he's joining 6.3 and CMS) when he learned about it from the CMS department. The program has allowed him to explore other areas (especially planetary science) and he recommends it to anyone who is deeply interested in joining two areas of study. Currently, Zach's working in the Media Lab, designing new interactions for digital animators, and he hopes to continue his research there.
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Katharine Chu
CMS, Class of 2009
Katharine came to MIT from Dallas, Texas. 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.
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Daniel Dahan
CMS, Class of 2012
Daniel Dahan is native to sunny Los Angeles, California. 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 explored 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.
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Claxton Everett
CMS, Class of 2010
Claxton Everett earned a Bachelors in Comparative Media Studies with a minor in Music. He was also QA Tester and Communications Assistant for the MIT-GAMBIT Lab. 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 said, "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." He attributed his success at MIT to the amazing minds and inspirations he has encountered within CMS faculty, students and mentors.
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Jennifer Fu
CMS, Class of 2011
Jennifer Fu, native of Plano, Texas, studied Comparative
Media Studies program and at he 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; after arriving at the Institute, her CMS-related interests broadened to fan studies, Web 2.0 advertising and marketing, and game design. She 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. Jennifer wrote on anime fanartists in the United States and some
of the issues they face, including authenticity, racial prejudices,
and questions of intellectual property.
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Benjamin Jones
CMS, Class of 2013
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.
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