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MS Software Management Blog

Wondering if a Carnegie Mellon degree is right for you? Read along as our students chronicle their journey through the MS in Software Management program.

	Amin is a second year grad student in the MS Software Management program, a former Software Design Engineer from Microsoft and a current Software Engineer at Adify, a Silicon Valley startup. He is passionate about entrepreneurship, software and traveling. He would love to start a software company someday.
	Vineet is a second year part-time software management student, currently working @NetApp also nominated as the best place to work in North America recently. His area of expertise is Oracle ERP solutions. Other professional areas of interest are SaaS markets both technologically and business wise. @CMU he wants to grow his knowledge to manage software products and businesses. He is interested in work on start up ideas. On the personal side he loves to spend time with his family and travel.
	Rene is a recent alum, a manager of operations and program manager in Cisco's software development organization, the mother of two daughters and a performing arts fan.

Monday, October 8, 2007

Back to School and the Electives

I cannot deny that the 3 weeks break after the first year of the MS in Software Management was timely and needed.

The start of the second year required us to choose between the various courses offered as electives. For example, this semester we were offered a choice of four courses, each one running as a mini-semester of 7 weeks. Typically the semester is 14 weeks long, and if the semester is broken into two, you would have a mini-semester of 7 weeks each. In either case you do get a week off after the first 7 weeks of the mini-semester.

We had excellent choices for electives this semester. We had to choose between Business Strategy and Human Computer Interaction (HCI) for the first mini and Product Marketing and Open Source for the second mini.

I elected to take the course on HCI and Product Marketing for this semester.

There are six of us in the HCI course and this contributes to a very interactive session. Instead of breaking into two groups of three each, we decided to work as a single team. This gives us twice the time with the coaches and the faculty as well as the experience of dealing with a larger team.

The initial three weeks of this course have been extremely hectic for me, as I had to travel for work. I did not miss a lot of designated coach facilitated meetings or plenary sessions, however, I did miss a few ad-hoc team meetings and reading sessions. This brings me to the topic of traveling for business or pleasure while at school. I think it can be managed but it does put undue pressure on your team members especially if you are traveling overseas or to the east coast from the west coast as connectivity while traveling is still an issue and is compounded by the time difference.

I don’t know the solution to this issue except to minimize traveling as much as possible. Luckily, the meetings remain flexible, so I can continue to keep up with my course assignments and not put all the burden on my teammates.

I am really enjoying and learning a lot in this course. Next week I will discuss HCI.

posted by Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley @ 3:18 PM 

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