Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Tech Treck and Spring Semester

I had heard about the tech treck before, thanks to Samir Sawant who is part of Media Lab Club. I took the opportunity to join the club (finally) and went on three day Tech Treck trip in JAN '09.
Even being at distance (350 miles from Boston) I took 8 trips to Boston last year and tried to keep some face to face time with atleast some of the classmates...that being said distance student do miss on lot of cool stuff happening at MIT.

Tech trip was nice, got to meet folks from Sloan and SDM and did Media (IT), Energy and BioTech on each of the three days. For me it was more of a sampling and networking opportunity. The theme everywhere was that there are very few hirings (except Medical devices and Health sector companies we visited) and intership opportunities.

Jan '09 has gone as soon as it came like previos years..:-) and today was the first lectures of Spring Courses. I have taken Tech Strategy which looked like a great lecture, lot of discussion, lot of energy and lot of student involement , I have heard some good things about this course. The other one is ERBA (Engineering Risk Benefit Analysis) which also looked promising.

So here diving in to Spring Sem and I'm sure there will be lot of interesting storied along the way which I would like to share more often than I have shared them in past.

- Ashok Dhiman.

SDM so far...

Its been a great year...I enjoyed the Fall courses I had:
a. Systems Architecture : I don't know where and how I will use what I learned in Systems Architecture . I think course is looks at a very high level at Systems Architecture and gives a very generic view. I really likes the guest lectures though - Liebeck and Imrich...Its always good to hear people from real world who have used Systems Architecture principles but in varied ways.

b. Project Management: The best of this lecture apart from Project Management theory and tools was prof. De Weck. I really liked is focused and disciplined teaching style. His lectures had nice balance of discussions and the material which needs to be covered. Lot of time profs get carried away by discussion and digress from lecture which can be fun at times but folks loose on the content which was suppose to be covered. This seldom happend in De Weck's class.

c. Software Systems Architecture: This lecture was ad hoc, except some consistent lectures around healthcare and software evolution. Part of the course was to read "Dreaming in Code" which I thought was alright books, it had its high and low chapters. The course load was light though and there were lot of interesting readings and videos which we saw and discussed.

The load was quite a lot though and I wanted a break so badly after Fall semester that I did not even touch any book for next 6 weeks, just took rest, spent some resting time with family and friends. Now back in Spring Sem I think I should have spend couple of weeks to get back in study mood.

SDM so far has been about reading from a spectrum of subjects and for me I guess challenge is to tie all pieces together. Going forward I think I'll need to look back and gather the linkages from courses which are done and the ones which are remaining and get some kind of structure. The good or bad thing about a program like SDM is that you have quite a bit of flexibility to choose what you want to study but it also needs good amount of thinking and planning to choose right courses which will best suite the career path ahead.

Some of SDM'08 have left, best of luck to them. Got to talk to some of the SDM '09 folks - welcome....Looking forward to meet you folks during Spring Business Trip.

- Ashok Dhiman.