Throughout his first 12 months at MIT in 2021, Matthew Caren ’25 obtained an intriguing e mail inviting college students to use to develop into members of the MIT Schwarzman Faculty of Computing’s (SCC) Undergraduate Advisory Group (UAG). He instantly shot off an software.
Caren is a jazz musician who majored in laptop science and engineering, and minored in music and theater arts. He was drawn to the school due to its give attention to the utilized intersections between computing, engineering, the humanities, and different educational pursuits. Caron eagerly joined the UAG and stayed on all of it 4 years at MIT.
First shaped in April 2020, the group brings collectively a committee of round 25 undergraduate college students representing a broad swath of each conventional and blended majors in electrical engineering and laptop science (EECS) and different computing-related applications. They advise the school’s management on points, supply constructive suggestions, and function a sounding board for modern new concepts.
“The ethos of the UAG is the ethos of the school itself,” Caren explains. “If you happen to very deliberately carry collectively a bunch of good, attention-grabbing, fun-to-be-around people who find themselves all fascinated with utterly various issues, you may get some actually cool discussions and interactions out of it.”
Alongside the best way, he’s additionally made “expensive” pals and located true colleagues. Within the group’s month-to-month conferences with SCC dean Dan Huttenlocher and Deputy Dean Asu Ozdaglar, who can be the division head of EECS, UAG members communicate overtly about challenges within the pupil expertise and supply suggestions to company from throughout the Institute, equivalent to school who’re growing new programs and on the lookout for pupil enter.
“This group is exclusive within the sense that it’s a direct line of communication to the school’s management,” says Caren. “They make time of their insanely busy schedules for us to clarify the place the holes are, and what college students’ wants are, instantly from our experiences.”
“The scholars within the group are keenly fascinated with laptop science and AI, particularly how these fields join with different disciplines. They’re additionally enthusiastic about MIT and keen to reinforce the undergraduate expertise. Listening to their perspective is refreshing — their honesty and suggestions have been extremely useful to me as dean,” says Huttenlocher.
“Assembly with the scholars every month is an actual pleasure. The UAG has been a useful house for understanding the coed expertise extra deeply. They have interaction with computing in various methods throughout MIT, so their enter on the curriculum and broader faculty points has been insightful,” Ozdaglar says.
UAG program supervisor Ellen Rushman says that “Asu and Dan have accomplished an incredible job cultivating an area wherein college students really feel secure mentioning issues that aren’t constructive on a regular basis.” The group’s options are regularly applied, too.
For instance, in 2021, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the architects designing the brand new SCC building, offered their renderings at a UAG assembly to request pupil suggestions. Their unique interiors format supplied only a few of the hybrid research and assembly cubicles which might be so widespread in as we speak’s first ground foyer.
Listening to robust UAG opinions concerning the kind of open-plan, community-building areas that college students actually valued was one of many issues that created the change to the present ground plan. “It’s tremendous cool strolling into the personalised house and seeing it continuously being in use and at all times crowded. I really really feel glad after I can’t get a desk,” says Caren, who has simply ended his tenure as co-chair of the group in preparation for commencement.
Caren’s co-chair, rising senior Julia Schneider, who’s double-majoring in synthetic intelligence and decision-making and arithmetic, joined the UAG as a first-year to grasp extra concerning the faculty’s mission of fostering interdepartmental collaborations.
“Since I’m a pupil in electrical engineering and laptop science, however I conduct analysis in mechanical engineering on robotics, the school’s mission of fostering interdepartmental collaborations and uniting them by way of computing actually spoke to my private experiences in my first 12 months at MIT,” Schneider says.
Throughout her time on the UAG, members have joined subgroups centered round reaching completely different programmatic targets of the school, equivalent to curating a public lecture sequence for the 2025-26 educational 12 months to provide MIT college students publicity to school who conduct analysis in different disciplines that relate to computing.
At one assembly, after listening to how difficult it’s for college kids to grasp all of the doable programs to take throughout their tenure, Schneider and a few UAG friends shaped a subgroup to discover a answer.
The scholars agreed that a few of the finest programs they’ve taken at MIT, or pairings of programs that basically struck a chord with their interdisciplinary pursuits, got here as a result of they spoke to upperclassmen and bought suggestions. “This type of tribal data doesn’t actually permeate to all of MIT,” Schneider explains.
For the final six months, Schneider and the subgroup have been engaged on a course visualization web site, NerdXing, which got here out of those discussions.
Guided by Rob Miller, distinguished professor of laptop science in EECS, the subgroup used a dataset of EECS course enrollments over the previous decade to develop a special sort of instrument than MIT college students sometimes use, equivalent to CourseRoad and others.
Miller, who repeatedly attends the UAG conferences in his position because the training officer for the school’s cross-cutting initiative, Common Ground for Computing Education, feedback, “the actually cool concept right here is to assist college students discover paths that had been taken by different people who find themselves like them — not simply fascinated with laptop science, however possibly additionally in biology, or music, or economics, or neuroscience. It is very a lot within the spirit of the Faculty of Computing — making use of data-driven computational strategies, in help of scholars with wide-ranging computational pursuits.”
Opening the NerdXing pilot, which is ready to roll out later this spring, Schneider gave a demo. She explains that if you’re a pc science (CS) main and want to create a visible presenting potential programs for you, after you choose your main and a category of curiosity, you possibly can develop an enormous graph presenting all of the doable programs your CS friends have taken over the previous decade.
She clicked on class 18.404 (Idea of Computation) because the beginning class of curiosity, which led to class 6.7900 (Machine Studying), after which unexpectedly to 21M.302 (Concord and Counterpoint II), a complicated music class.
“You begin to see mixture statistics that let you know what number of college students took every course, and you may additional pare it all the way down to see the preferred programs in CS or observe traces of crimson dots between programs to see the standard sequence of lessons taken.”
By getting granular on the graph, customers start to see lessons that they’ve most likely by no means heard anybody speaking about of their program. “I believe that one of many causes you come to MIT is to have the ability to take cool stuff precisely like this,” says Schneider.
The instrument goals to point out college students how they’ll select lessons that go far past simply filling diploma necessities. It’s only one instance of how UAG is empowering college students to strengthen the school and the experiences it gives them.
“We’re MIT college students. We now have the abilities to construct options,” Schneider says. “This group of individuals not solely brings up methods wherein issues could possibly be higher, however we take it into our personal palms to make things better.”
