Master’s in Information Graduate Speaker Reflects on the Diversity and Future of Information Studies
Tanay Mahindru was the Master of Information Management and Systems student speaker at the May 2024 UC Berkeley School of Information Commencement
Tanay Mahindru delivered the following address on May 18, 2024, at Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley —
Good afternoon everyone.
Greetings to the friends and family of students, and the staff and faculty of the I School. I wanted to start by thanking you. None of this would be possible without your support.
And to the MIMS graduating cohort of 2024 — congratulations! You’ve made it.
My name is Tanay Mahindru and I’m humbled to be standing here to speak to you all today. To try and capture, however crudely, a small fraction of what this journey might have meant.
Writing this was an interesting experience for me, because it gave me the chance to reflect. To think back to about how we got here, what we went through, and where we might go.
All the way back to receiving a call with the news of the acceptance, and starting to meet each other one Slack introduction at a time. It doesn’t feel like very long ago that we walked into the orientation, name tags and all, slowly settling into everyday life here.
I thought back to trying to make pretty logos for the School of Information in one of my early assignments. To getting to know each other through pair programming and commiserating in our shared frustration to making a five leveled faceted category system.
Later, I thought back to sitting with a different set of you every week, while trying to solve legal problems in the labs for our class on law and policy, and writing plots to Black Mirror episodes while allegedly examining the Social Issues of Information.
It was always striking to me how many different reasons we all had for being here. How many different things we wanted to do with what we learned. To how many different careers we had in mind for after we left. The final presentations were a small glimpse of this — an amazing showcase of the diversity of this class — and a clear marker of how far we’ve all come.
As I would imagine a lot of you have come to learn over the last two years — the MIMS program can evade classification, and sometimes even an easy description. Ironically, we are not easy to categorize or organize, even as we try to impose this view on the information we study. We stand at the boundaries of what may be considered typical.
What perhaps brings the MIMS cohort together is the appreciation of the nuances of technology, questioning its inevitability even as we contribute to its development. An appreciation of what it takes to harness the power of technology to achieve some idea of good, even as we develop the vocabulary and sense to challenge what we know is not.
It feels like we’re coming to interesting times. Not unique, perhaps, in the role that information will play in them, but maybe distinct in how fast and with what magnitude.
Information is no longer simply organized and found; it is generated. Perhaps at a speed and of a nature that will take some doing to tame. But as anyone who’s studied the evolution of the bicycle might remember, we have — society has — a role to play in this story too.
I rest assured in knowing that the people in this auditorium are now going to find themselves taking what we learned here into every kind of career in this developing landscape, from ML engineers to policy makers; product managers to user interface designers; software developers to researchers; and to academics. You will have a part to play.
And it was lovely to get to know you all, in even just the small ways. To hear about your weekends and all your amazing adventures as we bumped into each other in front of the coffee machine in the lounge or the printers in the Co-Lab.
Who knows, maybe I’ll bump into you some random Thursday night some random time, in some random joint in Berkeley.
But until then, I can only wish you all the luck.
And ask that we remain as thankful as we are informed.
Go bears!
