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MS in Software Engineering, Technical Track Blog

Wondering if a Carnegie Mellon degree is right for you? Read about our students' experiences through the MS in Software Engineering, Technical Track program.

	Rahul is a full-time MS Software Engineering, Technical Track student. He loves traveling, trekking, swimming and is a complete movie buff.
	Anthony is a 2nd year part time student in the MS Software Engineering, Technical track program and works at OSIsoft as a Software Engineer. He loves spending time with his family, hiking, biking, gardening, cooking, and sometimes photography.
	Suma is an alumna of the MS Software Engineering, Technical Track program. A Mechanical Engineering undergrad, she loves writing and is passionate about music, shopping and dogs.
	Minh is a Software Design Engineer at Microsoft and alumnus of the MS Software Engineering program. He is also a Vietnamese community activist, a cat-lover and passionate fan of film music.
	Nick is a Software Engineer at Google and a first-year grad student at Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley. He loves hiking, gaming, and both really extremely good and extremely bad movies.

Thursday, March 15, 2007

Students, Faculty and Team-Building at Carnegie Mellon West

As I was going through four days of orientation at Carnegie Mellon West last August, I was getting more excited and enthusiastic than ever before. The more I got to know the curriculum, the faculty and my highly-motivated and exceptional classmates, the more I fell in love with this program. I couldn’t think of anything better-suited for my academic/professional career than this.

The Students

Orientation started with all 57 students of the Class of 2008 first getting to know each other through an appetizer and beer mixer in the courtyard, followed by a nice, formal buffet dinner on campus. The first thing I noticed was the very impressive caliber of diverse students with remarkable backgrounds and well-rounded experiences. You know how you go into computer science programs and always meet those “nerdy nerds” sitting in the computer labs who talk about technical stuff 24-7, who lack all communication and people skills, and cringe when exposed to sunlight? Well, this class is comprised of software engineers from the other side of the demographics spectrum. It’s so refreshing to meet motivated software leaders from various renowned companies who are not only passionate about what they do, but also possess great communication skills and have great personalities. My team for the Fall 2006 semester, for instance, consisted of employees of IBM, Google, Lockheed Martin and myself from Microsoft. We turned out to be an exciting team and I very much enjoyed the dynamic and collaborative efforts; in fact, I would love to work with them the real world.

The Faculty

Carnegie Mellon West is a private school, and boy, does it feel like a private school (you know you are attending private school when they start serving you wine, and shower you with Carnegie Mellon laptop bags, shirts, caps, mugs, stickers and even school chocolate)! With a student-to-faculty ratio of 8:1, we develop close relationships with our professors, and I am on a first-name basis with all of them. Just as I was with my classmates, I was duly impressed by the faculty (my professor for the first semester used to work as software engineer for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on the Mars Pathfinder mission--how cool is that?!).

Since Carnegie Mellon West pursues a practical approach to software engineering education, both faculty and students pretend to be in a fictitious company. My faculty act as fictitious stakeholders (say VP of Engineering or VP of Marketing), and we negotiate requirements, coordinate schedule plans, and have weekly status meetings with them with the goal of delivering some products at the end of the semester. It’s a very holistic approach as you learn more than just computer science and coding; you also improve your people and leadership skills as you interact with the faculty and your teammates.

Team-building

If there was one thing that was cemented in our heads during orientation, it was the importance and significance of team-building. I’ve attended so many leadership workshops and seminars in the past with the same old cheesy icebreakers, that there is little that can surprise me anymore; however, I encountered something totally different during orientation.

We spent almost two hours on a project to build a castle made out of Lego bricks in a small team. Building the castle itself took only 15 minutes really, but we were asked to assign roles and carefully plan construction to minimize construction time as much as possible: one person was the warehouse manager (and provided the team with the Lego bricks), one person was the construction manager (the only person allowed to put bricks together), one person was the quality assurance manager (the only person allowed to walk to the prototype model situated on another table for comparison), while I acted as the project manager (trying to tell the other managers what to do next). We planned, constructed, reflected, analyzed, re-planned, improved the process, constructed again, reflected again and so on. It was very interesting to see the team dynamics change and improve through open communication and careful planning at each iteration. It sure was a very fun approach to learning software engineering and team dynamics through Lego bricks.

The four days of orientation was a confirmation for me that Carnegie Mellon West was true to its word, and was delivering everything it promised. Although I was quite nervous about the workload that was ahead, I was encouraged to start the program off with such a bang.

Next time: Surviving my first semester at CMU West.

posted by Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley @ 11:31 AM 

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