To reflect and order thoughts concerning the themes of digitalization and sustainability throughout the Information Science master curriculum, students were asked to deliver a short write-up concerning these themes for each of the courses they attended for the master programme. Some of the intended learning outcomes were to engage in a critical discussion about digital transformation of society and business, and the sustainability of this transition.

My student journey was a bit atypical. I come from the human movement sciences bachelor, but it was clear for me that I wanted to work somewhere more commercial than in the sports world. I completed part of the computer science programme and wanted to do a masters in this area, preferably datascience related. The information science master was the only programme available to me, but unfortunately I quickly found out that information science != datascience. For some reason the programme has this focus on sustainability, in the broadest sense of the word. I care deeply for the environment, but did not appreciate this focus, I would have preferred learning more about the fundamentals of information science, maybe some formal logic or better modeling? Then again, my interests are in the theoretical concepts of data science and the practical applications of digitalization.

Students were provided with a google sites template and template questions. As one of the intended outcomes is some feedback on the programme, and creativity and originality are valued, I decided that this portfolio would be a right opportunity to develop and host my personal website (personal artifact). The portfolio (this page) is part of it, but the project quickly escalated and feel free to look around :)

(P1) The academic year started with two courses: Knowledge Organization by Ronald Siebes and Tobias Kuhn, and Digitalization and Sustainability by Patricia Lago. Knowledge organization is one of the courses where I remember what we learned most vividly. We discussed the semantic web and possible ways to give meaning to digital information. Unfortunately, this is quite a broad topic which was crammed into too little time. I would have loved to spend more time on themes like propositional logic, but I recognize that I’m interested in this theoretical background, and noticed some fellow students not sharing this interest. Concerning the content: I enjoyed learning about the semantic web and RDF. I did the course on relational databases, but storing knowledge in a graph like this was new to me. During my thesis I played around with Neo4j, and the course helped me a lot with the concepts, and I can see how I would be implementing such systems in my carreer

P1 also offered Digitalization and Sustainability. Whilst I find Patricia Lago a kind and smart professor, I cannot recall anything from the course except the group work sessions where we were all sitting behind a laptop. Diving into my archive I found this group assignment about garbage collection, and whilst I did think about ways to digitalize garbage collection for the project, a lot of the content was stating the obvious about the definition of sustainability. Reflecting on this, I realise that this has mostly to do with my personal interests not being in this domain. Wich I quickly realised during the course. I proactively enrolled into the courses “Economic challenges”, “Introductory Econometrics” and “Advanced Programming”. Linking advanced programming to digitalization seems easy, but I was pleasantly surprised by the contents of economic challenges by Iwan Uttens. Ofcourse we discussed how scarce resources can be divided, but we also talked about the Malthusian theory of population, postulating that the world population might grow so quickly that we cannot sustain it with the farmland. Luckily, agriculture technology has postponed this catastrophe, but it shed a lot of light on the (economic) principles behind sustainability.

As I liked the challenge, I decided to enroll into “Nudge: Influencing behaviour”, “Network Analysis”, “Marketing 1”, “Data Analytics for Accounting and Control”, “Information Retrieval”, “Managing Negotiations: Getting to Yes”, “Logistics Analysis”, “The Social Web”, “Supply Chain Data Analytics”, “Digital Architecture”, “Behavioural Game Theory” and “Statistics with R” in P2. Especially creating a viable rooster with the VU site was horrible, but information retrieval and the social web thought me to build some web scrapers

This might seem like an impossible challenge, but I completed 7 courses (42 ECTS) with an average of 7,2. I found Digital Architecture to be especially dreadful, as it was a 4-hour consecutive lecture. I decided to attend the Nudge workgroup, leave a bit early, attend one and a half hours of DA, and move on to behavioral game theory. There was little for me in the course, and after reading the literature and book, I feel like you mostly need a lot of practice to become a good digital architect. We did a serious game which was nice, but I don’t think most people got the jist of it and optimized their strategies for the wrong outcomes.

I liked the social web, but the entire course felt a bit outdated. Most social media is no longer open access, and trying to make things work with mastodon felt mostly like a theoretical endeavor as no one (except academics) use it. As the API’s of other social media platforms are no longer accessible, it felt like one big workaround for what once was a great course. Due to the other courses I was following, I had little time at hands, but during the vacation I decided I wanted to automate some scraping of instagram, and with some “manual” automation using python and selenium, I applied what I learned in Information Retrieval and The Social Web to do what I want. Additionally, learning about the social web put the takeover of twitter by Elon in some different perspectives.

Supply Chain Data Analytics, Logistics Analysis and Network Analysis were massive. Usually, talking about sustainability feels like a lot of that- talking. However, in these courses we applied maths to optimize loads of different operations such as transportation and storage. Obviously sustainability is broader than increasing efficiency, but learning the tools to optimize operations and minimize their environmental footprint is exactly the part of sustainability that I was interested in. Maybe include those (Logistics Analysis might be a bit to hard for IS students, but Supply Chain Data Analytics is a great course, especially as it discusses some advanced statistics and machine learning methods!) into the IS programme as electives?

I enjoyed statistics with R a lot as well. It was fun to learn some more statistics, but I mostly enjoyed playing around with the possibilities of Rstudio and quarto. During the time I was thinking about working in seed valley (make sustainable crops), and this seemed like a nice entrance. Data Analytics for Accounting and Control was a lot of fun as well. We learned to analyse financial data, and we could download near real-time stock market prices via a VU subscription. I’m still building an automated trading bot to become extremely rich in the near future.

After earning 66 ECTS before the Christmas break, I felt pretty burned out. However, the thesis assignments were coming up, and I found out that companies were willing to pay for me to write a thesis there. I applied at Capgemini and was accepted to do a project concerning smart sensor data & building energy performance analysis. Research Methodology and Thesis Design started in P3, and obviously the content itself does not have anything to do with sustainability. Sara is one of the most sweet, personal and energetic personalities I encountered at the VU, and going back to some epistemology was interesting. After having followed 7 courses in a period, having just one thing to focus on was relaxed, and I had some time to pick up some hobbies. Especially as things were taking their time with my Capgemini thesis project.

Then came P4. Having some relative ease, I decided to enroll into just 7 courses, and I started working as a TA for the School of Business and Economics. I really tried to follow the Entrepreneurship in Analytics and AI course, but it was of such low quality that I dropped out. It would have been better to call the course “Prompt Engineering” as all we were doing was creating prompts to generate a business plan using genAI. I did manage to follow most of the Eco-Systems disruptions by IT course by Jaap Gordijn, which also was cringeworthy. It started with a couple of slides “recent ecosystem disruptions”, using netflix and the iPhone as examples. Not exactly recent developments I would say, while there are countless more recent developments. Next to that I seriously wonder how Jaap Gordijn does not has issues concerning conflicts of interests as the model he is explaining during the lectures is also the model his private enterprise is developing. It was pretty neat to learn about the economic modelling of enterprises, but I would have expected from a master’s level course to think about the requirements of those models, and learning how to develop such models ourselves, instead of implementing the proprietary model developed by his corporate entity.

Having some setbacks as I did not find the courses offered by the IS programme interesting, I reached out to one of the programme committees and asked if I could replace the courses with some of the courses I did in P2. Apparently, you can switch 12 ECTS, and I no longer had to follow any courses for the rest of the academic year. If I wrote my thesis, I could be done in March.

I was enjoying myself at Capgemini and spending my time teaching for the Economics department. I completed some training to become a better TA (SAT portfolio), and had many interesting discussions about education (see: Misalligned incentives).

Concluding, I did enjoy my last year at university a lot, but not necessarily due to the IS programme. If you are an ambitious student, try to create your own extracurricular programme for some challenge. I realise that IS might not have been a great fit for my interests, but I am very happy I got the opportunity to study an additional year, get a masters degree, and spend time on courses that I found interesting.

I would be happy to provide honest feedback on the curriculum, programme design, or help out any other way upcoming academic years. Reach out to me if there is anything I can do.