Hi! I'm Jane Im. I am a sixth-year Ph.D. candidate at the University of Michigan School of Information and Department of Computer Science & Engineering, where I am fortunate to be advised by Professor Kentaro Toyama.
I helped SI and CSE faculty in designing the first proposal for evaluating PhD students who want to be formally enrolled in the two programs via SIDP. Please reach out if you want to do the same!
Before coming to Michigan, I was born and raised mainly in South Korea. I finished my undergraduate studies at Korea University,
majoring in Business and Computer Science.
I learned about Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) when I was visiting MIT, and was drawn to it because of my interdisciplinary interests and background.
If you want to chat about anything related to research and academia, feel free to email me. Other PhD students helped me when I felt devastated during my PhD, and I want to pay it forward. I am particularly interested in helping students from underrepresented groups.
Ever since I went to school, I've received a lot of questions about my name because it's not a common Korean name. In the United States, many people ask if "Jane" is my "real name." Long story short, it's both my Korean name and English name. "제인" is how you would typically write "Jane" in Korean. For example, "Jane Austen" is "제인 오스틴" in Korean. The pronunciation of "제" roughly matches to "Ja" and "인" roughly matches to "ne." There's a behind story on how my parents got the idea, but in essence, they thought 제인 (Jane) is good for both. My parents also matched Chinese characters to the name (which is pretty common in Korea)—I personally like the meaning of my name.