YOUR IMPACT
For the Love of Food Alex Goodstein “eats too much.” But in his side business, that self-proclaimed trait is a good thing. Goodstein, who graduated from IST in 2009 and works as a digital experience project manager lead at PNC, has a palate-pleasing side hustle as a Pittsburgh-area food influencer. With the help of an Instagram profile and a blog—light-heartedly titled ‘Alex Eats Too Much’—Goodstein tastes his way through the city. He samples a variety of menu items from restaurants, bars and food festivals in the region and shares those experiences with his followers. “Locally, there weren’t many people going out there and looking for new restaurants and telling people about them,” said Goodstein. “Now, four and a half years later, I’ve got a website and an Instagram, I’ve met a ton of great people and tried a lot of great dishes, and I’ve learned a lot about the restaurant industry. It’s been a very enlightening experience.” Goodstein has sampled everything from pizza and pierogies, beer and bourbon, and even a beef jerky bouquet. He also demonstrates his own culinary skills, sharing tips and tricks through recipes he follows or creates in his own kitchen that frequently incorporate locally sourced ingredients. “Over the years I’ve picked up a few skills in the kitchen, and I've picked up skills of how to eat more so than how to cook things,” he quipped. Goodstein recently shared his food influence with the Penn State community during the Penn State Cooking Classic on Feb. 2, putting a spin on Southern appetizers during his first-ever live cooking instruction.
“I spent a lot of time exploring different dishes, practicing them, and coming up with variations on them to make them my own,” he said. “[The Cooking Classic] gave me a fun challenge as well as an opportunity to build a connection with Penn State and IST and to highlight that alumni are everywhere, doing different things and trying new experiences.”
The need for a city’s website upgrade led to a coincidental IST collaboration this fall, when Spyke Krepshaw ’20 MS (right) was hired to redesign and redevelop the website for River Valley Transit, the public transit division of the City of Williamsport. After that project was successfully completed, the city’s IT director advocated for Krepshaw to meet with Mayor Derek Slaughter— who earned his bachelor’s degree from IST in 2003—to discuss redoing the City of Williamsport’s outdated and hard-to-navigate website. “I am always looking for ways to upgrade and update our systems and processes to be more efficient, particularly as it pertains to IT,” Slaughter said. “My degree in IST has allowed me to focus on these areas and ways in which we can utilize IT to improve the services we provide to the public.” 34 iConnect Magazine
Their shared IST connection not only led to a new website, but it allowed the two alumni to engage with and collaborate on the project on a deeper level. “We talked about our IST experience and how it really opened our eyes to the larger world out there,” said Krepshaw, an assistant professor of computer information technology at the Pennsylvania College of Technology. “One of the coolest things the mayor and I discussed is how humbling our IST experience had made us. We both consider ourselves fortunate to have been around amazing professors and students alike.”
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A Shared Connection
