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MS Software Management Blog
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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. |
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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. |
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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 13, 2008
Orientation and First Week of Classes!
In this entry I will explain my experiences in the Software Management
program Orientation and the first week of class.
The Orientation brought together all of the students entering Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley this fall. Key points explained in an opening session included the concepts of a learning community, learn-by-doing methodology, student collaboration in small teams, and a project-based curriculum. We would be learning in a curriculum that does not include lectures and is instead based on participation in facilitated plenary sessions and team meetings, absorption of assigned readings and outside research, and completion of individual and team-based assignments. We were encouraged to take responsibility for our experience by creating our own learning plan.
Several team-based activities during the orientation enabled us to get to know other students and to work on our leadership, communication, and collaboration skills. We attended a presentation by the CEO of a well-known software company in which we came to appreciate the contextual leadership style of the presenter. A workshop on
presentation skills gave us feedback on how to communicate more effectively. I emerged from the orientation feeling grounded in the principles of the program and eager to connect with my new classmates and team members.
The first class for our Software Management cohort is a 7-week course called Elements of Software Management. The structure of the course includes a weekly facilitated plenary session encompassing discussion of readings and explanation of that week's assignment. In the first plenary we learned that our class was geographically distributed, with many students attending from other places in the United States and one from outside of the US. We discovered that while our motivations for attending the program had some common elements relating to understanding the business of software, additional reasons included the desire to understand different business models and approaches to
business analysis.
posted by Rene Newton @ 2:47 PM
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