about vitak

I grew up in Baltimore County, MD and attended Catholic school through high school. I was a pretentious kid, always the class clown. I also loved playing sports (especially lacrosse) and performing in various drama club productions.

After high school, I wanted to really get out of my comfort zone, both literally and figuratively. I attended Elon University in North Carolina, an amazing small, liberal arts school. There I fell in love with media studies. I can’t speak highly enough of the School of Communication there and the impact it has had on me academically. I ran the radio station, WSOE, for a year while there and was an editor for the weekly newspaper (The Pendulum). I graduated in 2002 with dual bachelor’s degrees in communication (broadcast and corporate)  and journalism.

After college, I moved to the DC area and began a five-year stint as an editor at PR Newswire, an international news distribution service. I loved the job, but it wasn’t challenging enough, so I decided to go back to grad school. At first, I thought to pursue a graduate degree in sociology, but that didn’t work out, so I went back to my home field, communication.

I completed my master’s degree at Georgetown University’s Communication, Culture & Technology (CCT) program in Washington D.C., writing my thesis on the role social network sites play in changing the face of interpersonal communication. This research was facilitated by a quantitative analysis of college Facebook users through a survey of more than 600 Georgetown University undergraduates. A digital copy of the thesis can be accessed here.

I love to travel and while at Georgetown, I was able to spend a month traveling through China as a part of an NYU-based study abroad program. It was amazing. I’ve also been to much of Europe, Bermuda, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii.

I am currently working on a NSF-funded grant in The Online Interaction Lab (TOIL) looking at collaboration on social network sites with MSU professors Nicole Ellison and Cliff Lampe. We’ve been quite a busy research team over the last year, with presentations given, scheduled, or submitted to ICA, NCA, HICSS, and iConference.

In the past, I have been involved in the maintenance of two professional blogs in addition to this one. The first is on the Pew Internet & American Life Project website. I worked for Pew from 2007-2010, first as an intern and then as a consultant. I coauthored the Project’s Digital Footprints report, released in December 2007, and its Teens & Video Games report, released in September 2008.

The other professional blog I have written for is gnovis, CCT’s peer-reviewed academic journal, where I was previously the peer review manager. My posts on gnovis typically focused on trends in social networking.

In my free time, my favorite thing to do is experiment in the kitchen. I love both cooking and baking, and I make my own pasta, granola, applesauce, stocks, sauces, and soups, among many other things. Each Christmas, my family and I make ~3500 cookies over four days and then give them away to pretty much everyone we know (see picture for some of the cookies from 2010). It’s uber stressful, but it’s also one of my favorite times of the year. I’m also a big fan of growing my own food, from tomatoes and basil to carrots and squash (although the squash have not been very successful this year).

If you’d like to contact me, I can be reached here.