It’s springtime: warm, overcast, sometimes raining. Late on a warm night, the network went down at Rendez-Vous and all the laptops closed. Possibly inspired by the Big Ten Burrito renaming contest (my entries, sadly unselected: “Big Billion Burrito” and “It’s a Burrito-ful World We Live In”), Rob is running a contest to rename Michigamua. It’s the end of the semester, and I’m almost halfway through through the graduate program (too late to quit, too early to leave); I wouldn’t recommend this School of Information to anybody, except that I often do. The SI weblog aggregator gives an incomplete, if representative, sample of who and what is lurching through these halls, and it’s towards these halls that I now go.
Noor | 12-Apr-06 at 6:45 pm | Permalink
Hmmm, why would you not recommend SI? I’m curious! Feel free to email me privately if you’d rather.
Oh and I didn’t know about the aggregator. And what the heck is that image?!?
Brian | 13-Apr-06 at 1:02 am | Permalink
I was goofing around with a graphics library, the image is a screenshot of a little animation I made.
My issue with SI is that the curriculum contains a lot of bullshit, and it’s harder than it should be to find the people, books, and battles worth dealing with.
That said, there’s a lot of flexibility in the program for people to ignore “specialization” and go follow their bliss — but that’s effective to the extent that individuals are able to articulate their interests and then find where to work through those things across campus. I personally am doing fine in this regard, but that’s mostly because I’ve been around U-M way too long.
However, the above only applies as far as interests are represented at all in or around SI, and there are some areas in both research (pervasive computing) and diddling grad student development / professional education (SIGs instead of professional associations, and a more technical or problem-solving approach in general) in which I knew SI was weak, but hadn’t imagined it’d be such a wasteland.
So if anything, any unhappiness on my part is a direct consequence of not learning enough about what actually (doesn’t) occur at SI before taking the dive. Buyer beware, etc.; but there are other people I’ve talked to who are looking for the same things I was, and it’s only fair to observe that this SI probably isn’t the best choice.
This commentary probably sounds a lot worse than it should — I’m really grateful for a lot of the experiences and ideas I’ve picked up in the first year of school, but knowing more now than I did before, I realize that there are other SIs elsewhere which more directly offer some of what I had hoped to find here. And, ultimately, the ivory tower isn’t the right place to do this stuff anyways — although it is (to mangle metaphors) a nice two-year pit stop!