Matthew Klein is a native of the South, who grew up in North Carolina and studied philosophy during his undergraduate degree. Matt says “you never stop doing philosophy” and despite the differences between his undergraduate institution, which only had 2,000 students total, and MSU he is applying his philosophy background toward a Master’s in Communication Arts and Sciences. He found himself at MSU because of a connection he had with an undergraduate mentor. One of Matthew’s professors during his Bachelor’s degree completed their schooling at Michigan State and after that class and a collaborative research project, the two kept in touch. That professor remained a mentor to Matt and pushed him to take the GRE and consider graduate school. “Life is this weird concatenation of events,” he says, noting that it was a combination of his mentor, available funding, and the highly ranked program that brought him to MSU.

Broadly, Matthew’s research focuses on emerging technologies and interpersonal communication with the goal of employing modern vantage points and new tools to solve old problems. His interests have brought him to the teams of various projects. In one project, Matthew is looking at Chatbots and how they provide social supports in addition to how they are impacted by people's expectations of them. He is also a lab assistant in the Center for Avatar Research and Immersive Social Media Applications (CARISMA lab) where he is utilizing virtual reality (VR) in a couple of different ways. For one project he is collaborating with other units to develop scenarios in VR to determine how people look at oncoming traffic for applications in automated vehicles. He is also a part of the first study in the world that is collecting nonverbal data from job interviews using VR and audio/visual data. For Matthew, all the things he does connect because “getting a graduate degree is getting a tool kit as much as it is getting the degree so all the things I’ve done fall under the broad umbrella of my interests.”

In 2013, Matthew's hero completed suicide. Experiencing the death of someone was new for him, and the event brought on serious depression. He called on his philosophy roots and wrote a lengthy paper reflecting on French philosopher Jacques Derrida to process. “One thing I learned from that time was the necessary value of relationships and people. I couldn’t have escaped that trauma even if I was pretending I could be alone in the world. Reading Derrida helped me understand the seriousness of life but also that every moment is new. Now is a new moment from five seconds ago. We can direct our caring towards other people- even people who we don’t know because each moment can have gravity to it. I realized I want people to feel loved- people to know they are important. A lot of times we’re conceptualized by our accomplishments, and there is a lot more of humanity than that,” says Matthew. He imagines his future impacts will be to use technology and communications theoretical tools to expose people to that thinking; helping people build emotional infrastructure so they can respond to life in a healthy way.

Originally written and photographed by Makena Neal, 2019