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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, January 19, 2009

Gathering and Practicum


After a quite relaxing winter break, I'm back in Silicon Valley and ready for the next semester. But first, I'm at the Gathering. This is an experience that part-time students will encounter twice in the course of their two-year curriculum, after each two semesters. At these weekend events, we gather everyone in the MS Software Engineering program to the Silicon Valley campus and so we can have real face-to-face time with the classmates and teammates we've been talking with over the phone in the courses thus far.

We have workshops and activities planned that aren’t just academically related, but fun, like an improv show or something similar or a nice dinner in downtown Mountain View. This time, The Gathering included a tai chi seminar – the purpose was to talk about health and wellness. As software engineers, the faculty want to make sure we not only are fed academically, but also help us to take care of the other aspects of our lives.


But after this, I'll be starting on the Practicum course. This is really the capstone course for us, where we apply what we've learned to a real-world project. Personally, I'll be working with Nokia on a context-aware reminder system with three other people. This, I think, is going to be a really challenging test of what we've learned, and I'm looking forward to it. It's going to be wildly different from anything I've done at Carnegie Mellon so far. So it's with a nice mix of apprehension & excitement around the challenge to come that another semester begins.

posted by Nick Lynn @ 3:41 PM  0 comments

Wednesday, January 7, 2009

The Fall semester ends as colorful as it should...

Running neck to neck with tight schedules and strict time lines, amidst challenging course work, technical seminars and student workshops; our fall semester finally comes to an end.

Foundations of Software Engineering was a special course designed for specific requirements like team roles and project practices. Apart from trying new technologies, we also learned how to be an effective team player, efficient developer and constructive critic; all that takes to succeed as a team.

Avoiding Software Project Failures and Metrics for Software Engineers were other courses that help us as software engineers to study, understand, devise and propose the solutions to the problems posed in the coursework. We studied different samples and we invented possible solutions for them. In most cases, the problems were recurring software discrepancies and unavoidable crisis situations in software projects. The solutions we presented aimed to either solve the problem or reduce the accountability to loss if the problem persists. Both of these courses were real examples of the Carnegie Mellon learning-by-doing methodology – as students, we really saw the principle behind all the courses in this discipline here.

My semester was also spent doing much reseach, as a Research Assistant. For those who are interested in trying their hand in mobile software development, there are a number of opportunities. There are many research projects here for students to choose from ranging from mobile haptics to mobile meeting arrangers. “Smart spaces” is another research area where the faculty are developing intelligent senior monitoring systems.

Lastly, I spent my free time attending a number of workshops and special speaker engagements. We have some good technical seminars from different people in the industry, workshops on technologies like Ruby on Rails, Rho Mobile for mobile web development (development in Rails). Also non-technical resume writing workshops like effective resume writing and how resumes could be improved to make them reflect your skills and personality.

This is the right place to be, if you are looking out for something challenging and intuitive.

posted by Sumalatha Komarraju @ 11:20 AM  3 comments

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