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Zayira Jordan
Program Assistant
Zayira has extensive corporate background with over ten years of experience in advertising and public relations in the Caribbean and Latin American markets, both English and Spanish speaking. She graduated with a B.A. in Journalism in 2001, and then, in 2004 with a M.A. in Cultural Anthropology from Iowa State University where she assisted in teaching anthropology and women's studies courses.
Through her job as a Graduate Assistant for the Ronald E. McNair Postbaccalaureate Achievement Program, Zayira is involved with administrative and pedagogical duties such as developing class plans, keeping up with the scholars’ progress on their research projects and applications to graduate school, and offering support in the creation of their presentations. Zayira says, “My work with the McNair program is extremely satisfying as it allows me close interaction with students. It has represented the kind of career I plan to pursue as a professor: to not only be the one who stands in front of the class to teach a discipline but to serve as a mentor, collaborator and offer guidance to the students I come in contact with.”
At this time, Zayira has completed the coursework conducive to the doctoral degree in Human Computer Interaction. She holds that this interdisciplinary area has allowed her to combine her interest in the social sciences with her technology background to analyze the impact of technology on social practices. She is specifically looking at practices enabled by the so-called new media: the world wide web. The subject of her dissertation is the impact adolescents’ online communication practices have on the formation of their social networks and, in turn, their identities. The goal of her research project is to reach an understanding of the possible lack of awareness of the implications new media have as a massively accessible venue rather than an interpersonal vehicle for communication. In the end, she expects to propose a model for adolescent online social interactions that could contribute to the creation of policies to address public concerns about the well-being of adolescents as a result of their online communication practices.
Zayira has also collaborated in the design of numerous websites from the conceptualization to the implementation process and has worked on instructional web course development. She is knowledgeable in various areas of computational perception and obtained third place on a peer-reviewed contest with a technical demo on brain-computer interface.
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