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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.

Friday, October 26, 2007

Just Getting Started here at Carnegie Mellon West!




Hello, I’m Nick, a first-year student at Carnegie Mellon West, in the MS Software Engineering program. I’m excited to share my experiences with you as I start this two-year program and hope you’ll enjoy reading my stories as well!


Well, here I am, back at Carnegie Mellon, a little bit to my surprise. I graduated from Carnegie Mellon (Pittsburgh) undergraduate in 2006, choosing to accept a job from Google here in Mountain View, over a fifth-year Master's there. I really felt like I wanted real-world experience and a job instead of spending more time in academia. So I came out here to Silicon Valley and started work. Things at Google have been great, but after a few months I realized that there were real skills I was lacking in terms of operating effectively at my job. I knew a lot of about algorithms and theory but not much about organizing a team or design patterns for software. After attending an info session at Carnegie Mellon’s west coast campus, I said to myself, "If they teach what they say they teach, this is exactly what I'm looking for."

This program's goals are extremely functional and real-world. The faculty strive to get you change your mind-set, so its almost like you’re not in an academic classroom – you’re in a work-like environment with a team of people who are all working together to accomplish the same goals. I've already been able to apply some of the things I've learned to my work habits at Google, specifically on how to be effective in meetings. Getting a real experience on how to create good software is something that, to me, is much more valuable than yet another way to solve the traveling salesman problem. I'm sure I'll learn some new approaches to things while I'm in the classroom, but what’s cool is that I learn just as much from my teammates who are all working at other tech companies.

I think I'll get more into the specifics of the program over the coming weeks, but I'll give a brief overview of how things have gone so far. After a weekend orientation to get started (which was loads of fun) we were given an overview of a software program that each team will be expected to upgrade and release as the next version. Teams consist of three or four people, and my team has a pretty diverse background. There's another person who, like me, is about a year out of undergraduate and works for a local software company, a second with several years of work experience who works for an online video advertising company, and a third who has many years of experience who works for a company doing embedded hardware and systems. In the orientation, we started to gel really quickly and have gotten off to a good start. The first few weeks we spent getting up to speed on XP/Agile programming strategies as well as mocking out the UI changes and user scenarios we'll be programming towards. We've just taken our first steps towards coding and I'm looking forward to applying XP to see how effective it is for our team.

In another 2 weeks, we’ll have a brief demo of how far we have gotten the program that we just started modifying a week ago--so it'll be interesting to see if we can get as far as we hope.

posted by Nick Lynn @ 11:29 AM 

4 Comments:
Blogger Sheeraz said...

Hi Nick,
It was good to see that you have started out the program at CMU West hand-in-hand to your job at Google. Your experience will be very worthwhile for others to benefit from. I'm a Software Engineering Masters' program student at another school with a job as a Software Development Engineer at a networking company, and was pondering over doing a 2nd Masters from CMU, or at least get a good insight from what is learnt, implemented (developed) and experienced in the academic world at CMU. I will be attending an info session at CMU this month, and I'm hoping to get the same key points from there as well.

Keep us posted with your experiences, and best of luck for the upcoming projects!

-Sheeraz

November 8, 2007 at 4:38 PM  
Blogger Naveed said...

HI Nick!
I am a student of BS in Software Engg.
I wanted to know where should i do my MS from?
I want to have free education!
in europe
i know it is presnt in many countries.But i need your guidence.Looking forward to your guidence.Thanx
Naveed

March 31, 2008 at 5:55 AM  
Blogger neha said...

Hi Nick!

I have an interview for the MS-software management program. Could you please guide me as to what are the topics discussed and also some pointers so as to clear the interview?

March 17, 2014 at 2:31 PM  
Blogger neha said...

Hi Nick!

I have an interview for the MS-software management program. Could you please guide me as to what are the topics discussed and also some pointers so as to clear the interview?

March 17, 2014 at 2:33 PM  

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