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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.

Monday, July 9, 2007

Spending a 2 ½ week vacation in Europe in your 1-week summer vacation


For undergraduate students, summer vacation is that special time in June/July when you spend time relaxing, taking a pleasure trip somewhere out-of-town, and doing absolutely no work. For most full-time graduate students, that definition remains unchanged. However, for us Carnegie Mellon West students, it’s slightly different, as you don’t really get a long summer vacation, but this blog entry will explain this in further detail.

Although the program is called a “part-time program” because all of us work during the day at our full-time jobs, we are still carrying a full academic load of 12 units per semester. I often refer to myself as a full-time student and a full-time employee – certainly my time is completely filled with one or the other. As a result of different deadlines and schedules, the term “vacation” starts to take on new meanings. I sometimes have weeks where I have school vacation, but still show up in my office at work Monday through Friday, or sometimes I take days off from work but still meet with my schoolmates in the evening to finish up deliverables. Real vacation as you know it is now constrained to the intersection of your school and work vacation. Unfortunately, for some people those two sets are disjointed, leaving you with … well, nada.

I assume that most students have the flexibility to schedule their work vacation around school vacation. Fortunately we are given our vacation schedule well in advance. In fact, the following was/is my actual vacation schedule (which was given to me when I started the program in August 2006).

Saturday, 12/16/06 - Sunday, 01/07/07 (three weeks)
Saturday, 02/24/07 - Sunday, 03/04/07 (one week)
Saturday, 04/21/07 - Sunday, 04/29/07 (one week)
Saturday, 06/16/07 - Sunday, 06/24/07 (one week)
Saturday, 08/11/07 - Sunday, 09/02/07 (three weeks)
Saturday, 10/20/07 - Sunday, 10/28/07 (one week)
Saturday, 12/15/07 - Sunday, 01/06/08 (three weeks)
Saturday, 02/23/08 - Sunday, 03/02/08 (one week)
Saturday, 04/19/08 - Sunday, 04/27/08 (one week)
Saturday, 06/14/08 - Sunday, 06/22/08 (one week)

The rule of thumb is that you always get three weeks over the Christmas holiday, three weeks between your first and second year, and a single week in the middle of every semester. Since we are having three semesters per year, we really don’t get an entire summer off (unlike other full-time grad students). So, the art of actually having a great vacation and recuperating from work and school is then to plan well in advance so that you can schedule your work vacation around these dates. If you and your significant other are planning to have a baby, subtract 9 months from those bigger three-weeks vacation chunks to be safe…. you get the idea.

As you can tell from my schedule, my one-week summer vacation just passed. However, I spent the last 2 ½ weeks roaming around in New York, Berlin, Rome and Venice, and in fact my last homework assignment was sent from New York City, while my last blog entry on Software Architecture was written from Berlin. How did I manage to go on vacation for 2 ½ weeks? Well, for one, I left on vacation a few days earlier than my classmates, because I had to attend an important event in Germany that I couldn’t move around. I had to request an exception to leave early and negotiated with my team to do more work prior and after my vacation. Secondly, I was expecting to do school work during the second half of my trip, but the bed and breakfasts that we stayed at in Italy did not have internet, and finding internet cafes was more difficult than I expected, so I ended up having a 2 ½ week vacation (no, really, I did try to participate in school meetings, since I came prepared with my laptop, headphones, Skype and LiveMeeting set up).

So overall, vacation schedules at Carnegie Mellon West ain’t that bad. They do provide opportunities to recuperate so that you don’t get burned out and go postal, and since you are dealing in relatively small teams, you can always negotiate with your teammates and the faculty for custom vacations. With that flexibility, the only other worry I had in the last two weeks was “who is going to swing by and feed my cats?”, but I suppose this is not of your interest. Cheers.

posted by Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley @ 12:33 PM 

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