Rob Goodlatte  

The spring semester of my junior year at Duke is nearing its close with finals beginning next week. The week after that I’ll be flying to Seattle for a summer internship with Newsvine.

I couldn’t be more excited about this internship—I’ll be spending the summer working on the user interface of Newsvine alongside one of the best teams in the business. I’ve been a fan of the service since day one—Newsvine brings some much-needed authenticity and transparency to the news businesses that’s frankly been missing for awhile.

Newsvine has just released an entirely new, entirely bad-ass user interface codenamed Evergreen which I’ll have the pleasure of working on this summer. I’ll be working directly under Mike Davidson—which will undoubtedly be an amazing learning opportunity and will provide the sort of direct access to leadership that no corporate internship could provide.

For my final project in Literature 182S—Weapons of Mass Entertainment (my fun course this semester), I wrote a series of essays exploring the reward systems and specific rewards that motivate gamers to play. This includes typical in-game incentives and external incentives—including aesthetic rewards like game visuals, reward trophies, and even the physiological responses a video game experience can evoke. To explore the topic in depth, I’ve posted all of my writings thus far on Why Do We Play?— I site I designed to serve as a discussion place for the topic.

The site is built on WordPress—I will eventually release the WordPress theme for free. Before that happens I need to work all of the bugs out of the code and re-design the template slightly to make it more generalizable. Let me know what you think of the design here, and feel free to comment on any of my writings there.

Maybe I’m a tad biased… Update: 3/15: Wow, that was quick.

David Allen’s Getting Things Done is a must-read for anyone stressed out over ever-changing projects, responsibilities, and deadlines both at work and in life. As a college student, I’m constantly bombarded with new course assignments, job applications, and social responsibilities. The Getting Things Done system manages stress through collection of ‘loose ends’ though ‘next-action’ lists and by keeping the system simple.

I’ve adapted GTD to suit my personal needs and my needs as a college student, which I’ll outline below. If you’re unfamiliar with GTD, I highly recommend picking up the book. Also, be sure to check out 43 Folders, a blog that focuses on productivity and GTD techniques.