What is the association that comes to your mind when hearing the word “CHIA”? A small seed? A healthy lifestyle, perhaps? A curiosity for what hides behind this acronym? A student association with the longing for creating meaningfulness?

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Let’s say, it has to do with all of this! The computer-human interaction association CHIA was founded in spring 2024 out of the desire of some current students to make a change! Put together, the small individual visions we had for our masters program and student life grew from little seeds, step-by-step into an official union association that is slowly but surely bearing fruit.

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Centered around the Master’s program for Human-Computer Interaction in Uppsala, we aim for creating a study environment for our students that feels sound, inspiring, and forward-looking by meeting our needs and kindling our curiosity.

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Our vision for this is simple but clear and consists of these four core elements:

• social life & creating a community Studying is more than just attending seminars and passing exams. It is about creating connections with classmates and meeting outside of university, enjoying fun activities and having an active social life. This is what we want to foster within and across the different batches of HCI students!
  
  
• career preparation Work life starts soon enough after a short two year master’s program and it is important for us to feel equipped for starting a job. Thus, we are striving for getting adequately prepared for jobs in both academia as well as industry. Reaching out to companies for career events, inviting speakers with different professional backgrounds within the field for inspirational talks, and planning workshops with career-relevant focusses are hence of course on our agenda!
  
  
• education We believe that it is a great privilege to study at Uppsala University and that we are provided with a rich education. However, no university or course comes without the potential for improvement. Thus, we encourage a critical reflection on our courses that we can use to make a change for ourselves and the students after us. Besides that, we aim for additional offers to boost our soft skills and learn outside the box.
  
  
• connecting our departments HCI is a quite wide-spread and multi-disciplinary field touching on sociology, design, information technology, and much more which means that we are located somewhat between the chairs of informatics & media (at Ekonomikum) and IT (at Ångström). To get a more holistic view on our field and be aware of the opportunities we have, we are striving towards connecting the two departments that we are affiliated to, while officially belonging to the department of informatics and media.
  
  

Are you affiliated to HCI at Uppsala University or will you start studying here soon? Then we would love to welcome you to CHIA!!

If you would like to hear more about what we do and why we do it, feel very free to reach out to us!

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