Students utilize Internet to serve varied purposes

 

By Mary Hoang
Daily Bruin Contributor

UCLA researchers had a hand in creating the Internet, and today
UCLA students and alumni use the Net for various personal and
public purposes ““ from personal home pages to startup
companies.

Thirty years after that first computer-to-computer connection,
the modern Internet pervades the lives of many UCLA students and
alumni both on and off campus.

Current and former Bruins use the Internet in as many ways as
there are different Web site genres. Some of their sites offer
information to the public, while others will put out personal
pages. Still others may also form startup companies, wishing for
the influx of cash that Internet has brought so many others.

One avenue fifth-year political science student Grey Frandsen
and first-year public policy graduate student Ryan Ozimek took was
to create a forum to deliver political information. They formed the
Political Information Center Network (www.picnet.net).

“We take politics and make it digestible, usable and
hopefully encourageable by focusing on the technology of
politics,” Frandsen said.

“The Web is our medium as it is the most dynamic, flexible
and efficient means of getting information disseminated to people
who need, could use or should be involved in political
discourse,” he added.

Frandsen reflected on how his experience as an undergraduate
student at UCLA has helped him and his fellow PICnet
organizers.

“UCLA has obviously created the framework by bringing
together the components ““ us ““ and has allowed us to
utilize the most valuable resource UCLA offers ““ its
students,” he said.

Ileana Perez, a 1999 alumna of The Anderson School at UCLA, also
decided to put out a Web-based service for people, but of a
different sort.

Perez founded CraniaMania, an online real-time forum for high
school students to compete with each other in eight academic arenas
spanning from essay writing to SAT math and knowledge of world
events.

Perez, the CEO of CraniaMania (www.craniamania.com), wanted all
high school students to experience academic competition, especially
if they were not able to in school. She said she saw an opportunity
in the online medium because “offline academic competitions
are exclusive and have registration fees.”

At The Anderson School, Perez said she learned the skills
necessary to write a business plan, and the networks she formed in
the business world while in school have enabled her to launch her
first Internet startup.

While some students and alumni decided to use the Internet for
its business and political possibilities, knowledge of the Internet
is slowly becoming one of the fundamental requirements of an
undergraduate education.

In many first-year General Education cluster classes, good
old-fashioned research is combined with knowledge of Web site
design, and how students perform at both of those tasks may
determine their final grade.

As a portion of their final exam, students in GE Cluster 70:
“Evolution of the Cosmos and Life” were assigned a Web
site project.

“In our groups, each of us had to have two pages of
written text and pictures on the web page which was then linked
together to present our topic,” said second-year linguistics
student Adriana Rodriguez.

Reflecting back on the project, Rodriguez said, “It was
fun and much easier than I first thought. I felt smart after I
finished it. I’ll probably make my own Web site in the near
future too.”