Graduate Student News

in industry, and it catalyzed a sequence of research questions that led me to apply and enroll. During my time in the Hubbard School M.A. program, Dr. Carlson inspired new research directions I didn't know were possible, motivated me to submit to conferences and awards and, importantly, he taught me how to write in academia. Of course, while there are other faculty members I wish I could express my gratitude to at length here, I am so thankful for the time, experience and thoughtfulness Dr. Carlson and Dr. Bélair-Gagnon have provided during my time in the School.

Q What advice would you give someone considering graduate school?

A Study what you want to learn about, rather than what you think your faculty advisor might think is important or what your cohort might think is interesting. Ultimately, you’re the one that will do all the work of answering imperative questions about media and communication, so it should be what interests you. Try to focus your attention on identifying what you can lose time reading about, what you want to talk to others about, and what you think is a meaningful contribution to society. Answer questions about why you think this topic is important compared to another, how you might go about exploring your interests, and what support you need to fulfill your inquisitiveness. While graduate school may feel overwhelming, your passion studies will help ground you, remind you that you’re worthwhile, and validate that your unique perspective is an important gift. MARAL ABDOLLAHI, along with Assistant Professor Colin Agur and former Hubbard School graduate student Eu Gene Lee, published “Conceptualizing the roles of involvement and immersion in persuasive games” in Games and Culture. The article studied how students responded to a digital game about refugees.

BUGIL CHANG received the Dan Wackman First-Year Graduate Student Research Award for his paper “I distrust you all because one of you did something wrong: Spillover effect of distrust elicited by an NPO’s crisis on overall NPOs.” The award comes with $2,500 and was established with generous gifts from the Hubbard School’s professor emeritus, Dan Wackman, and others, to honor a first-year graduate student or small group of graduate students who produce the best research paper for a completed first-year graduate project in Mass Communication.

ROWAN MCMULLEN CHENG earned the First-Year Graduate Student Research Award, Honorable Mention, for her paper “Busking the news: Institutional journalistic critique and author-audience relationship on Substack.” The honorable mention comes with an award of $500.

TANIA GANGULI joined The New York Times as an NBA writer. Before coming to the Hubbard School, she was the Lakers beat writer for the Los Angeles Times.

EUNAH KIM published two papers with Professor Jisu Huh: “Intentional ad-viewing to support video creators on digital video-sharing platforms” in Journal of Marketing Communications and “The sound factor in autoplay mobile video ads,” in Advances in Advertising Research.

CLARA JUAREZ MIRO accepted an offer for a three-year postdoctoral position at the University of Vienna, researching audience expectations of journalism.

ALLISON STEINKE was awarded the University of Minnesota Graduate School’s Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship for the 2021-22 academic year for her dissertation project, “The Institutionalization of Solutions Journalism.” She also presented at two conferences, including the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) conference in August 2021 as part of the Communication Theory and Methodology (CT&M) Division in a presentation titled “Cultivating Cognitive Legitimacy: The Case of Solutions Journalism,” and as part of the Cardiff Future of Journalism Conference hosted in Cardiff, Wales, United Kingdom, in September 2021, with a presentation titled “Solutions Journalism: An Adaptable, Legitimate, and Resilient Global Institution.”

Bugil Chang

DANFORD ZIRUGO contributed a paper to African Journalism Studies titled “Subverting journalistic routines: When political satire intervenes to challenge public broadcasting national discourses.” The paper seeks to understand peripheral news actors in African communication ecologies.