Alumni News

1986

Dave Nelson is married to Kim Olson Nelson (GAC '85 math major).  He received his BSCE degree from the U of M in 1990, and is now a Civil Engineer with SRF Consultants in Plymouth, Minnesota.

Doug Williams, who graduated from GAC with a double major in Accounting and Computer Science, attended grad school at the University of Minnesota for two years, graduating with an MBA in June 1988.  He has worked at Alliant Techsystems since then in various accounting roles.  He says that he really benefitted from his double major, since they complemented each other so very well.  One of his most interesting assignments came between 1994 and 1997, when he was involved in converting their mainframe accounting systems over to Oracle Financials.  His role evolved over time, starting on the implementation team, and then rising to a program manager for the last year and a half.  He says he used a lot of what he had learned in his CS major to help in the process, and felt that his ability to understand both the accounting and technical sides of the project helped greatly.  Doug is currently a product line finance manager working in one of their operating units, and is also a corporate recruiter.

1987

Bill Larson is currently working at West Group (formerly West Publishing) in Eagan, Minnesota as a Manager in the Content Technology area.  He says that the organization's charter is to provide software that acquires, converts, and renders data for their online and print research products.

Kristine Lund has worked for ten years in the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) in France as an engineer, first in Paris as a UNIX systems administrator in a Particle Physics research laboratory, later in Lyon as a UNIX, Mac and PC systems administrator and educational computer program developer in a Didactics and Cognitive Science research laboratory, and now (still in Lyon) as a "Social Sciences" engineer in a research team doing Cognitive Science and Language Sciences.  She obtained the equivalent of a Master's degree in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Paris 6. Her Master's thesis was entitled "Contribution à la conception et à la Réalisation d'un Environnement d'Apprentissage Collaboratif dans le Domaine de la Physique : c-chene" (or "A Contribution to the Conception and to the Development of a Collaborative Learning Environment in Physics").  She is currently working on a PhD thesis in Cognitive Science and hopes to propose an analytical model for explanatory dialog, a model which would rest on what is cognitive about explanation and what is interactive. The working title is "Etude des processus d'interprétations chez les enseignants du fonctionnement cognitif-interactionnel des apprenants" (or "The study of the processes of teachers' interpretations of learners' cognitive and interactive functioning").