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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.

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Summertime at CMU


Greetings friends,

It’s been some time since I’ve written and quite a bit has happened! First off, Spring semester ended and I’m now some weeks into the Summer semester. I’m taking two elective courses this summer - Introduction to Open Source, and Human Computer Interaction. See, during the summer, our schedule shifts a bit, instead of taking one course at a time for 7 weeks each, we take two classes at the same time, but for 12 weeks (the whole summer semester). This allows for a much more leisurely pace, along with a week-long break in the middle of the semester.

Both are going terrific so far, with research projects kicking up steam at the moment. In Introduction to Open Source, I’m on a team of 6 people from all over the spectrum, and we’re evaluating proprietary & open source operating systems for mobile devices, in order to determine which is the easiest to develop software. So far we’ve only had a couple meetings, but the level of talent on the team is tremendous! We have someone working on the Google “Android” operating system, someone working in mobile computing from HP, someone that worked on developing the Java language at Sun, and a couple other folks like myself that work in the Aerospace industry representing the “customer” perspective.

During class, our professor, Dr. Tony Wasserman, has had various speakers in the open source industry come in and talk to us about open source from various perspectives. It’s been terrific to get a hands-on feel for where things are, from the very people I read about in the field.

In Human Computer Interaction, we’re studying usability engineering and learning about how user interfaces should be codified by doing a mock-up of an actual interface, then evaluating it as if we were actual Usability Engineers. It really is fascinating, what goes into designing interfaces for users, and will no doubt come in handy for me in the future.

Speaking of future, I’ve recently got on board the brand new “research” option for MS students, which will allow me to do research on top of my course load and produce a paper at the end of my degree instead of a practicum, allowing me to pursue a PhD afterwards! It’s amazing how many opportunities this degree has provided, before I’m even halfway through.

Well folks, I’m outta here, hope to be writing more frequently now that class has kicked in and things have somewhat normalized. As is the case with any college course, the first few weeks you have to spend time getting your bearings, but once you settle in things go pretty smoothly.

Thanks,

Daniel Maycock

posted by Dan Maycock @ 2:42 PM  0 comments

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