Pete Schult

Pete Schult G’10 is a family man and distance learning student in the Syracuse University iSchool’s M.S. in Library and Information Science program. Schult is currently working as a file clerk at Upstate Medical University.

Schult has enjoyed his time as a distance student. He classifies himself as an independent learner and said the online experience was a perfect match for his learning style.

Schult, who lives in Cortland, N.Y., has become very familiar with the SU campus over the past year. He works at the iSchool’s Center for Natural Language Processing once a week doing analysis of text using search engine technologies. He also has come to campus for occasional presentations and course boot-camps.

In addition to working full-time, Schult manages two classes each semester. “This has made for a rigorous workload,” said Schult, who maintains high grades and received the iSchool’s Leadership Scholarship.

Schult would like to work as a catalog librarian in an academic setting the future. For now, he has finished the necessary core requirements and is in the final stages of completing his degree. “The material covered will be of use to me, no matter what I do as a librarian,” Schult said.

He added that the online experience will be helpful in the future due to the vast amount of networking that takes place online.
Schult said he would definitely recommend this program to others; however, they would need to be a self-starter and be very motivated.

Schult earned an M.A. in linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, an MA in German at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, an MA in mathematics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a B.S. in mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin. Currently, he is very interested in the theory of grammar and its application to work in natural language processing. The applications he takes a special interest in are speech recognition, production, and machine translation.