Student Blogs
MS in Software Engineering, Development Management Track Blog
Wondering if a Carnegie Mellon degree is right for you? Read about our students' experiences through the MS in Software Engineering, Development Track program.
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Linda is a first year part-time student in Carnegie Mellon's MS Software Engineering, Development Management track. She is a Software Developer at Electronic Arts in Redwood Shores, CA. She likes to dance and sing and her favorite videogame is The Beatles RockBand. She enjoys Indian, Japanese, Thai, Italian and Mexican food. She comes from Mexico City, and has being living in CA for the past two years.
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Pras Sarkar is a second-year part-time student in the MS Software Engineering Development Management track. He works in Yahoo! Labs. His responsibilities include materializing ideas and concepts into engaging prototypes and demos, some of which ultimately mature into products that Yahoo! visitors use everyday. He is interested in emerging web technologies, social interaction over digital mediums, and creative interfaces that push the boundaries of human computer interaction.
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Vineet is a Lead Developer at Boeing and a second year grad student in the part-time MS Software Engineering, Development Management program. He loves reading, playing with his daughter and pursuing the religious aspect of his life. He is an active volunteer of Vedic Cultural Center, a Seattle-based organization dedicated to promote the Vedic (ancient Indian) arts, culture, music and dance. |
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Truc is a second year part-time student in Carnegie Mellon's MS Software Engineering, Development Management track. She is a Software Engineer at Lockheed Martin in Sunnyvale, CA. She loves food and enjoys anything related to food: going to different restaurants, cooking, watching the Food Network, and of course, eating! |
Friday, January 25, 2008
Getting Pushed Out of My Comfort Zone
Hi all,
Happy New Year 2008! So Foundations has ended and I move onward to a whole new semester, a new team and a whole new set of topics to learn. I’m currently in the Requirements course, semester two of the MS Software Engineering program. One of the most daunting things about starting a new semester for me was getting a whole new team. I had finally gotten used to the old team, made good friends with them, figured out the way they work and their time schedules and it was time to rotate and get a new team. At first I was annoyed and scared to try to get along with three new people but as I got to know these guys and started working with them, I understood what Carnegie Mellon was trying to do. They are trying to force us into uncomfortable situations, placing us slightly out of our comfort zone to make us grow. It’s been great getting to know these guys. Why had they chosen Carnegie Mellon West? Where did they work? What did they do, what technologies do they work on? How are things done at their work place? Every company is similar and yet also very different. Finally, you also realize that every person has such different strengths and by meeting a whole set of people; you are gleaning the best of everyone. It’s also a great networking opportunity.
Another thing about this semester I am starting to learn is that there are a lot of tasks to do, a lot of time to do them, but the time is not structured for you! We have basically 6 weeks that we need to divide and schedule and create milestones for ourselves. While this is a great way of learning time management, I’m also a bit nervous to see if we’ll finish our tasks on time! I’m sure we will, we are keeping to our schedule so far.
And lastly, something very important to note about this class is the introduction of team roles. In the last class, we each had informal roles that we created and kept. There was someone who’d take minutes and send out live meeting invites and the other who’d make sure things are done. But everyone did all jobs and nothing was formally set. In this class, we had to divide up official team roles, such as team leader, QA manager, planning manager, etc, among ourselves. We needed to learn what each of the roles meant and we have to rotate the jobs as the semester progresses. I was immediately excited to actually learn about the various roles but again, I was also a bit apprehensive about doing some of the positions. Most of my team members have already been one or the other at their jobs-each has more experience in industry than me!
For me, I knew the most challenging role for me would be the role of team lead for two reasons - the very fact that we don’t know each other that well yet and I knew some of them were team leads at their work right now! So in keeping with the theme at Carnegie Mellon, I picked the one that challenged me the most. Pushing myself into the team lead role and taking my teammates advice on some things has been very helpful so far. It is making me voice all my opinions, making me learn what’s due etc, learn to run meetings, and many more. I still have a few weeks left in this role and I’ll let you know how it all goes.
So that’s all for now, hope this has helped you a bit, and I’ll talk to you in a few weeks!
posted by Sirisha @ 10:05 AM
Thursday, January 17, 2008
The Gathering
Last week, we had what we call “The Gathering”: this is a meet-up event we have every two semesters where we have activities, special workshops, where some guest speakers come and talk to us about what they do in their various jobs… The event lasts about one and a half days (all day Saturday and Sunday morning), and I would say at this point it’s not so much about team-building anymore, since we know each other pretty well but rather a way to meet outside of school and have fun.
We started on Saturday with breakfast as people were arriving: we focused our discussion mostly on break and vacation and how we were all tired, but as Martin Griss (our Associate Dean for Education) put it: this is the last stretch before graduation, we have to hang in there and make the most out of our last two semesters.
While we were chatting, Martin Radley (one of our faculty members in the DM track) asked around for volunteers. I volunteered along with 3 other students not knowing what we were getting into: he handed us scripts with lines we were supposed to say during a little play and a Starbucks gift card to thank us (yay!). Once we were about to start, we got handed hats to choose from, somehow I wound up being the last one to choose and having to wear the shiny purple hat (I hope nobody took pictures – we all had a really good laugh).
The play was intertwined with discussions about being a change agent and what kind of techniques we can apply at work to initiate change. I recognized myself in a few of the situations we depicted and I wished I had known all of what we talked about a few years ago. The discussion was very interesting and we got to hear experiences from classmates about what they tried to implement, and how they succeeded or failed
Once we were done, Todd Sedano (Director of the Software Engineering program) arrived to tell us his little baby girl was born the night before and he couldn’t join us for the gathering. But he brought us some chocolate cigars and we all got to congratulate him.
After lunch, we had a workshop about professional presentations: we were shown a video of somebody presenting slides during a conference and asked to analyze several aspects of his presentation. The presentation was all about “chicken” (this is the only word he said), but it was nicely presented, and it really helped in showing us that a good presentation is not only about what you say but also how you say it.
We then had a little workshop about patterns: we were put together in teams and had to figure out what kind of patterns we wanted to apply in order to resolve some of our work issues. It was a lot of fun hearing other people’s work horror stories (well maybe not that bad), and trying to figure out how we should resolve the problems: should we take the team out to lunch or organize a brown bag session? Once we were done, each team presented their problem and what kind of patterns they decided to apply. Oddly enough, most of us chose to take the team out for food…
Once the workshop was done we had a breathing and light exercise class. One thing that’s great about Carnegie Mellon West is that it takes a holistic approach when viewing your career and education – and exercise is just as important to your well-being and career as learning code is. It was fun to look at each other struggling to achieve poses that look so simple. Then our guest speaker came in to give a presentation about the culture of change at Yahoo. He had a lot of experience to relate about how they went in trying to push for changes, from Perl to PHP, from PHP3 to PHP4… And it seems like every time they tried something new nothing quite worked like it should have but they keep on learning and trying different ways of changing methodologies, tools… Overall, I think Yahoo is on the right track and it sounded like a really nice place to work at.
It was finally time for dinner (more food, yeah). My group went to a Cascal, a tapas bar on Castro Street: I was at the table with Martin Griss and we got to talk about life, where the industry is headed, and the climate in the various parts of the world we all come from (that was the weekend of the storm in Silicon Valley) while enjoying the delicious food.
The following day, same ritual: we ate breakfast while people were arriving. Then we had a panel discussion about the future of the industry: several professors told us what they thought was going to happen after all these years of being part of the industry: from the rise of embedded systems (phones, toys, MP3 players…) and software as a service to the changes caused by the advent of emerging countries. Dean Morris had an interesting take on the discussion: he asked us what we were working on. His idea was: when you talk about the future, somebody in the room is already working on it.
Our final workshop was a team building exercise: we had to play a game based on the prisoner’s dilemma. And that was a nice metaphor for work: do you want to optimize your output at the expense of everyone else’s on the team or do you try to maximize your team’s output, or even your department’s output. There is no right or wrong answer, but this is something we all have in the back of our heads when we head to work in the morning.
When all of this was done, many of us chose to go to a restaurant in downtown Mountain View where we talked about our experiences at work, how frustrating or gratifying work can be… I think we were all delaying the time to say goodbye as this was such a great weekend. But after lunch we all parted our ways back home to get ready for our last two semesters.
This is the last stretch: it has been an awesome experience so far, and in less than 7 months we will be graduating. Like Dr. Griss said on our first kickoff day: this is a life-changing experience (even though I didn’t really believe it at the time). I had to give up some of my spare time to do it, but I think in the end the results will be more than worth it.
posted by Rom Lemarchand @ 4:02 PM
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