A profile of InfoSci alum Madeline Metcalfe
Madeline Metcalfe, UMD InfoSci Alum
Madeline Metcalfe ’19 is a technology native, having grown up immersed in the illuminating, expansive, and sometimes weird, world of video games. Her favorite one is Tales of Symphonia, a Japanese role-playing game that came out in the 2000s.
“It just has really cool themes of different kinds of life lessons that people should learn, about climate change and racism and just these unique themes that they throw into the video game that you don’t really think about until you’re actually in the game, and you’re like, ‘Oh, okay. These people are worried about the world’s energy,’ and it is alluding to climate change,” Metcalfe says.
It was her love of technology and how people interact with it that encouraged her to study information science as an undergraduate at the University of Maryland College of Information (INFO). She carried that love through her career. A serendipitous encounter the day after her graduation set her up in her current role as a business analyst. She was working for a title company at the time. Balloons bobbed around her workspace, and a visitor took notice and offered his congratulations.
“We get to talking. He’s kind of in the IT world, so he gives me his business card,” she says. Through his connections, she was able to meet the CEO of the company she currently works at—VerticalApps, a government contracting consultant firm. “I interviewed with them on a Wednesday in October, they offered me the job on Friday, and I started the next Monday.”
Much of the work the company does is IT consulting. “My first job there was under a contract with the US Army Corps of Engineers doing data visualization services,” Metcalfe says. The company was impressed by her background from INFO, particularly the various classes she took for data querying and data visualization.
“They heard about my capstone project, which was visualizing specific demographic data throughout Baltimore and seeing if there’s any correlation between health data and demographic data,” she says. “They were really interested in that, so they put me on this project where a lot of it was more IT focused, setting up software, things of that sort, but I did get to do a lot of training and visualization building.”
Once the contract ended, Metcalfe transitioned to a role with the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. In this position, Metcalfe helps identify ways to improve efficiency of processing certain forms, such as employment authorizations.
“Being able to use what I learned in the iSchool to help make data-driven decisions is very rewarding,” she says. The impact of the work goes beyond theoretical exercises tackled during her school years. “Back in school, it was just dummy data that we would work with. But now we’re working with real human lives and making an impact on them getting to work in this country, which I think is just really fantastic.”
Metcalfe credits INFO for instilling foundational knowledge and encouraging inquisitiveness. She notes that her education was holistic, emphasizing technology and business as well as critical thinking. One fundamental concept that she frequently references at work is the data information-knowledge-wisdom triangle.
“Even if you know data, you know how to work with data, you still need the information around the data, the metadata,” she says. “You need the knowledge and the wisdom to use that data. You can Google how to query something, ‘How do I query from this type of database?’ but you need to know why you’re doing it. I feel like the iSchool really gives you that foundational knowledge to learn and ask why you’re doing something.”