Throughout his first 12 months at MIT in 2021, Matthew Caren ’25 acquired an intriguing electronic mail inviting college students to use to grow to be members of the MIT Schwarzman School of Computing’s (SCC) Undergraduate Advisory Group (UAG). He instantly shot off an utility.
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 concentrate on 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 fashioned 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 progressive new concepts.
“The ethos of the UAG is the ethos of the school itself,” Caren explains. “If you happen to very deliberately convey collectively a bunch of sensible, fascinating, fun-to-be-around people who find themselves all inquisitive about utterly various issues, you may get some actually cool discussions and interactions out of it.”
Alongside the way in which, he’s additionally made “pricey” associates 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 converse brazenly about challenges within the scholar expertise and supply suggestions to visitors from throughout the Institute, reminiscent of school who’re growing new programs and on the lookout for scholar 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 elucidate the place the holes are, and what college students’ wants are, instantly from our experiences.”
“The scholars within the group are keenly inquisitive about laptop science and AI, particularly how these fields join with different disciplines. They’re additionally captivated with MIT and keen to boost 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 performed 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 ideas are steadily applied, too.
For instance, in 2021, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the architects designing the brand new SCC constructing, offered their renderings at a UAG assembly to request scholar suggestions. Their unique interiors structure supplied only a few of the hybrid research and assembly cubicles which can be so fashionable in as we speak’s first flooring foyer.
Listening to robust UAG opinions in regards to the type of open-plan, community-building areas that college students actually valued was one of many issues that created the change to the present flooring plan. “It’s tremendous cool strolling into the personalised house and seeing it consistently being in use and all the time crowded. I really really feel completely satisfied 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 know extra in regards to the faculty’s mission of fostering interdepartmental collaborations.
“Since I’m a scholar 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 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 attaining totally different programmatic targets of the school, reminiscent of curating a public lecture collection for the 2025-26 educational 12 months to present 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 know all of the doable programs to take throughout their tenure, Schneider and a few UAG friends fashioned a subgroup to discover a answer.
The scholars agreed that a number of the greatest programs they’ve taken at MIT, or pairings of programs that actually struck a chord with their interdisciplinary pursuits, got here as a result of they spoke to upperclassmen and bought suggestions. “This type of tribal information 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 Pc Science in EECS, the subgroup used a dataset of EECS course enrollments over the previous decade to develop a unique kind of device than MIT college students usually use, reminiscent of CourseRoad and others.
Miller, who usually attends the UAG conferences in his function because the schooling officer for the school’s cross-cutting initiative, Frequent Floor for Computing Training, feedback, “the actually cool thought right here is to assist college students discover paths that had been taken by different people who find themselves like them — not simply inquisitive about laptop science, however perhaps additionally in biology, or music, or economics, or neuroscience. It’s extremely a lot within the spirit of the School of Computing — making use of data-driven computational strategies, in help of scholars with wide-ranging computational pursuits.”
Opening the NerdXing pilot, which is about to roll out later this spring, Schneider gave a demo. She explains that in case you are 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’ll be able to 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 (Concept 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 combination statistics that inform you what number of college students took every course, and you may additional pare it right down to see the most well-liked programs in CS or observe strains of purple dots between programs to see the everyday sequence of courses taken.”
By getting granular on the graph, customers start to see courses that they’ve most likely by no means heard anybody speaking about of their program. “I feel that one of many causes you come to MIT is to have the ability to take cool stuff precisely like this,” says Schneider.
The device goals to indicate college students how they will select courses 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 provides them.
“We’re MIT college students. Now we have the talents 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 arms to make things better.”
