In December 2022, Ambar Amoros-Gomez clicked on an email that opened up her future path. The subject line read, “You’re eligible for free grad school programs.” 

This email — eye-catching even in a college student’s cluttered inbox — came from the University of Michigan School of Information, which earlier that month had made an unprecedented announcement: It would offer free graduate school tuition in two programs for current and previous recipients of U-M’s Go Blue Guarantee. 

Since 2018, the Go Blue Guarantee has provided up to four years of free undergraduate tuition for high-achieving, in-state students whose families meet the income criteria. The goal of the program is to keep a U-M education accessible to Michigan residents. 

“If it wasn’t for the Go Blue Guarantee, I could have gotten accepted to U-M and not been able to afford it,” says Amoros-Gomez, a first-generation college student and first-generation Dominican American from Grand Rapids, Michigan. “And in my community, that would have been the accomplishment — just being accepted, and not being able to go.” 

With the creation of the UMSI Graduate Guarantee, UMSI became the first U-M school or college to extend the Go Blue Guarantee to support graduate studies. 

“The program not only benefits students who may not have considered graduate school because of the cost, but also benefits the university and society at large by creating more pathways to the study of information at a time when this expertise is so critically important,” says Andrea Forte, dean of UMSI.

This fall, 32 students entered UMSI’s Master of Science in Information and Master of Health Informatics as Graduate Guarantee recipients. They hail from all three of U-M’s campuses — Ann Arbor, Dearborn and Flint — and from a range of undergraduate majors, including sociology, cognitive science and computer science. More than half are first-generation college students. 

“I'm proud that UMSI's leadership chose to use available funds to become the first school on campus extending the Go Blue Guarantee to residential graduate study,” says Judy Schabel, assistant dean for diversity, equity and inclusion at UMSI. “The field of Information benefits from as many perspectives as possible to solve seemingly intractable problems and make the world a better place.”

High-achieving, low-income students nationwide are significantly less likely to pursue a graduate degree than high-achieving middle and upper-income students. The goal of the UMSI Graduate Guarantee, Schabel says, is to help ensure that cost of attendance doesn’t deter talented students from UMSI’s graduate programs.

“It has been wonderful to get to meet the first cohort of the UMSI Graduate Guarantee and hear about the direct impact this program has made on their opportunity to attend graduate school,” says Laura Elgas, executive director of academic and student affairs at UMSI. 

One year into their UMSI journeys, meet two members of the first cohort. Both are using their unique interests within information science to address pressing issues.

The emerging health equity advocate

Ambar Amoros-Gomez first learned about the field of health informatics when she opened that email from UMSI over a year ago. As a biomedical engineering major at U-M, she was already passionate about health care and technology. 

“Health informatics is something that very much interested me, because it allowed me to incorporate my undergraduate degree,” she recalls. "But it also allowed me to do what I wanted to do, which was analyze data.” 

Amoros-Gomez had planned to get a job directly after graduation. Instead, after learning about the UMSI Graduate Guarantee, she applied to the MHI program and was accepted.

In her first semester, she took SI 542: Introduction to Health Informatics with clinical assistant professor of information Allen Flynn. “I got introduced to all these different things that I'm also passionate about, from electronic health records to consumer health informatics, that I didn't think could actually be a career field,” she says. 

For their final project in Flynn’s class, her group drew upon existing research in pharmacogenomics to develop a code that can use a patient’s genomic sequence to determine which antidepressant would be most effective for them. 

“So it's tailored to the person,” she says. “And this is something that could be implemented in an actual hospital. I really liked that class because it had an emphasis on what happens if the health care system is patient centered.”

Her cohort, which she describes as “very close,” is preparing to enter a field that has the power to reduce disparities in health care and improve patient outcomes. In their courses, they explore complex and weighty issues. She says they also have a lot of fun together. 

Amoros-Gomez isn’t yet sure which area of health informatics she wants to specialize in, but the notion of centering patients is the audible heartbeat of her studies. Recently, she has been exploring her concern for medical racism and medical research gaps related to race, ethnicity and gender. 

She gives the example of a study she has talked about with Flynn, which found that when Black and Hispanic patients with COVID-19 went to the hospital, they received inaccurately high readings of their blood oxygen levels on pulse oximeters. Patients who would have been eligible for treatment with remdesivir and dexamethasone were told they didn’t meet the criteria.

“Pulse oximeters sometimes struggle to accurately read darker skin tones due to differences in light absorption and reflection,” Amoros-Gomez explains. “If these medical devices were inclusive, would there have been fewer deaths from COVID-19 in the Black and Latinx communities?”

The impact she hopes to have over the course of her career is “making sure that people of color are getting the treatment that they deserve.” With Flynn’s encouragement, she is thinking about pursuing a PhD and further exploring overlooked issues in the health care system. 

“I feel like, in undergrad, the biggest goal for everyone is just to graduate and get a job. But in graduate school, you’re like, ‘OK, so what do I truly want? And how do I want to live my life?’” she says. “I’m now able to start thinking about those questions, knowing that with the Grad Guarantee I have the time, the support and the resources allowing me to do that.”

The video game archivist who wants libraries and archives for all 

Clayton Zimmerman firmly believes archives should be welcoming. And if you walk into U-M’s Computer and Video Game Archive, where Zimmerman greets visitors as an archives assistant, you’re more likely to feel giddy than intimidated.

Housing an interactive collection of video games, consoles and board games from the 1970s to present, the CVGA is a hybrid of a Blockbuster store and your childhood best friend’s basement. 

Zimmerman first visited when they were an undergraduate and Go Blue Guarantee recipient at U-M, majoring in computer science. “It was a Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory moment for me,” they recall. “I was like, ‘Oh, you can do that as a job?’”

Now, they are an MSI student at UMSI, studying library science and digital archives. “I knew, coming out of undergrad, that I didn't want to go into software. I wanted to go into something that's more person-facing on a day-to-day basis — more in the realm of a helping profession,” they explain. 

They taught fourth graders in Chicago through City Year, then moved back home to Michigan, where they worked as a page, then library assistant, in the Lansing library system. While interacting with the library’s patrons and collection, Zimmerman had a feeling similar to hitting the perfect drift in a game of Mario Kart — it just felt right. They wanted to continue on the path to becoming a librarian by getting a master’s degree.

“The Graduate Guarantee made it a very easy and enthusiastic decision to come back to U-M,” Zimmerman says, after they were admitted both to UMSI and a program in Maryland. “I was very grateful to find out that opportunity was available.”

One year in, Zimmerman says the MSI has broadened their perspective on what is possible in the field of information. First semester, they took SI 580: Understanding Records and Archives with assistant professor of information Patricia Garcia — a course that solidified their interest in archives. 

“She talked about how pasts are constructed,” they say, “and how much power there is in the archive.” This semester, they decided on digital curation as their specialization within the program, which speaks to their own past. 

“My whole life, I've been interested in Internet culture and digital objects and digital spaces, as someone who, in a town of 1,200 people, would say that I also very much grew up online,” Zimmerman says. While their upbringing was shaped by their rural surroundings, it was also shaped by the “strange, extra texture of being part of online communities.” 

In the CVGA, where Zimmerman works part time, visitors encounter a familiar texture, running their hands along the spines of cases and ROM cartridges. They can select a game — maybe one from their childhood — and play it with the original hardware and accessories. “I think there's something really powerful in recreating the experience of engaging with that artifact,” Zimmerman says. 

This work also brings them face-to-face with a longstanding debate — one that is central to their field of study. Over the years, they’ve witnessed public backlash against video games, including claims that video games are obscene and concern that they might negatively impact children. 

“I think that really echoes, or rhymes with, what we’re seeing happen right now in libraries, with this huge pushback against progressive values and fair representation of people of color and queer people, where people say, ‘Whoa! Think of the children. We need to protect them from this dangerous media,’” Zimmerman says. 

They point out that video games are now afforded protection under the First Amendment, following a 2011 Supreme Court ruling that cited their ability to communicate ideas, like books, movies, plays and other forms of art. 

At the CVGA, Zimmerman leads class tours and aids students with research for media studies, gender studies and English courses, helping them “read games as texts.” They find themself thinking about “how the past gets passed on” not only through letters, memos and photographs, but through retro games, controllers and instructional manuals. 

They are experiencing, firsthand, what it looks like to connect people with information, in a setting in which even newcomers and non-experts feel welcomed into the fold. 

As they enter a new field, Zimmerman has found connection with their tight-knit cohort and guidance from their professors and career advisors. 

“I would love to see a future where even more people can be extended this opportunity,” they say of the UMSI Graduate Guarantee. “I would love if we keep seeing that circle expand of who gets to come and have these experiences.”

— Abigail McFee, marketing and communications writer

LEARN MORE

The UMSI Graduate Guarantee is funded by the School of Information with additional support from the J. Karyl L. Winn Estate and the Mariann U. De Flon Estate. Make a gift to support the UMSI Graduate Guarantee.

Read: U-M School of Information extends free tuition program to include graduate programs

Read about Clayton Zimmerman’s experience designing a makeover for the university’s archives