Four days of school orientation at Carnegie Mellon West and –woohoooo– I am excited, motivated and enthusiastic as ever. The more I get to know the curriculum, the faculty and my highly-motivated and exceptional co-students, the more I am falling in love with this program and can’t think of anything better suited for my academic/professional career as well as holistic life than this.
The people
It all started Thursday night, when all the 57 students of the Class of 2008 first get to know each other through mingling/finger-food/beer in the courtyard followed by a nice, formal buffet dinner on campus (situated at the NASA Ames Research Center). The first thing I noticed, however, was the very impressive caliber of diverse students with remarkable backgrounds and well-rounded characters. You know how you go into computer science programs and always meet those nerdy nerds sitting in the computer labs that talk about technical stuff 24/7/365 while lack every possible communication and people skill and cringe when exposed to sunlight? Well, this class is everything but that demographics, so it’s so refreshing to meet motivated software leaders from various renowned companies who are passionate about what they do and possess great communication skills and have great characters that make them loveable people you just wanna hang out with. My team for the Fall 2006 semester, for instance, consists of employees of IBM, Google, Lockheed Martin and myself from Microsoft, and promises to be an exciting team as we embrace this diversity, as we want to learn from each other.
CMU West is a private school and boy does it feel like a private school (you know you are attending private school when they start serving you wine and flower you with Carnegie Mellon laptop bags, shirts, caps, mugs, stickers and even school chocolate). With a faculty to student ratio of 5:1, we are all on a first-name basis. Over the past four days, I ate breakfast, lunch and had dinner with all the faculty members, including the dean, and discussions were often not limited to just school and technology. I can’t wait to start this program, interact with the faculty and learn from them as much as they will learn from me. Just like the students that I have met, I am very impressed by the faculty (my teacher for the first semester used to work as software engineer for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on the Mars Pathfinder mission--how cool is that?!).
The program
CMU West prides itself with a story-based curriculum. We will learn Software Engineering not through boring lectures but through a learn-by-doing curriculum. Over the next two years, I will spend producing deliverables, collaborating with other students on projects, architecting, analyzing, gathering requirements, coding in a fictitious company (with faculty acting as stakeholders). We will actually go through a few full project life cycles that will span almost the entire two years, and at the very end, I even get to do a practicum where I will actually work on a real product for another Silicon Valley company.
The team
If there was one thing that we should have learned from the past four days, it would be the importance and significance of team building. I’ve attended so many leadership-workshops/camps in my life with the same old cheesy icebreakers, that there is little that can surprise me anymore, but I encountered something different this weekend.
We spent almost two hours on a project to build a castle made out of Lego bricks in a small team. Building the castle itself took only 15 minutes really, but we were asked to assign roles and carefully plan construction to minimize construction time as much as possible: one person was the warehouse manager (and provided the team with the Lego bricks), one person was the construction manager (the only person allowed to put bricks together), one person was the quality assurance manager (the only person allowed to walk to the prototype model situated on another table for comparison), while I acted as the project manager (trying to tell the other managers what to do next). We planned, constructed, reflected, analyzed, re-planned, improved the process, constructed again, reflected again and so on, and it was very interesting to see the team dynamics change and improve through open communication and careful planning at each iteration. It sure was a very fun approach to software engineering and team dynamics through Lego bricks.
The required reading prior orientation consisted of books, chapters and few scientific papers about team building, conflict resolution, and team dynamics and the orientation weekend provide amble opportunities to apply our readings into practice through a multitude of team-building exercises and educational games. I left today with a good sense of knowing my teammates very well, befriending them already to a stage that I’ve never even reached with past software teams. I wish I could have applied all the knowledge I heave learned this weekend to my previous companies and community projects!
In Conclusion
So, have I mentioned already how excited I am for this program? If everything goes right, my graduation date will be Saturday, August 9th 2008 (start marking your calendars, hehe). From today until then, I will go through a rigorous two-year program, leaving me with very little time, given that I continue my full-time job. I expect the next two years to be very challenging, I expect it to be demanding, and I expect it to push me to my limits. However, I embrace it, because demanding challenges that push me to my limits will only bring the best out of me, and I absolutely can’t wait. See you in two years, and let the journey begin.