Professional Background
Overview
Scientific Career (03/2006 – current)
I finished 2005 with my diploma in psychology and continued to pursue a scientific career. This led me to Tübingen, to the Knowledge Media Research Center, which offered a job in a project about New Media in Museums.
Scientist at Knowledge Media Research Center (03/2006 – current)
I am a scientist at the Knowledge Media Research Center in Tuebingen, Germany. My activities include scientific research, writing, and presentation, writing peer-reviews, assistance with courses. I am also a member of the local ethics committee and examine ethics proposals.
Dissertation Thesis (03/2006 – xx/2009)
During the first year of my dissertation, I thought about different possible thesis topics before finally focusing on the potential of electronic guidebooks (mobile media) for the support of interest and knowledge exchange, during and after museum visits. It deals with giving visitors of science and technology museums mobile devices which offer either additional information or easy access to the available information, and which allowed bookmarking of interesting information. I had the hypothesis that this would influence visitors’ interest and learning. While it was difficult to find differences on scales or knowledge testes, these devices had a strong positive influence on visit duration. More information is in a paper I wrote for the Nodem 2008 participation. To capture the rather non-psychological experiences during that time, I devoted a page to conducting a study with mobile devices as a psychologist and to conduct studies in museums.
Psychological Studies (10/1998 – 03/2006)
I did study psychology at the University of Bonn and was especially interested in General Psychology, Social Psychology and Organizational Psychology. During my studies I took some courses in computer science before I decided to focus on psychology which I finished with my diploma thesis at the end of 2005. The topic of my diploma thesis was: “Illusorische Korrelation – Eine konsensbasierte Perspektive” [Illusory Correlation -- A Consensus-Based Perspective] at the department of social psychology.
Internships
I did two internships, the first one for Wolff und Kollmar (2003 – 2004, parallel to studying and student jobs), a small consultant company. My job was to create course material about the topic: leadership, motivation, and communication. My second internship was for the T-Com (09/2004 – 12/2004), a Telekom division. My job was to help with the intranet launch “Storymanagement” which was part of a organizational development strategy.
Student Jobs
From the third semester onward I worked for four years as a student assistant at the University of Bonn. During this time I was responsible for the technology (computers, webpage, i.e. keep things running) at the department of Educational and Pedagogical Psychology (10/1999 – 09/2003) and for the support of study participants at the department of Social and Personality Psychology (09/2002 – 09/2003). After reaching the maximum number of years that I could be employed as student assistant at the university I worked for about two years as clerical assistant at the Senior Expert Service, where I did office jobs including correspondence in English.
