During his first year at the 2021, Matthew Caren '25 received an intriguing email inviting students to apply to become members of the Schwarzman College of Computing's (SCC) Undergraduate advisory group (UAG). He immediately made a request.
Caren is a jazz musician who specializes in computer science and engineering, and undermined in music and the theater arts. He was attracted to the college because of his accent on the intersections applied between IT, engineering, arts and other academic activities. Caron has impatiently joined UAG and stayed there during the four years MIT.
Trained for the first time in April 2020, the group brings together a committee of approximately 25 undergraduates representing a large strip of traditional and Mixed majors In electrical and computer engineering (EECS) and other computer -related programs. They advise the leadership of the college on issues, offer constructive comments and serve as a resonance committee for new innovative ideas.
“The ethics of UAG is the ethics of the college itself,” explains Caren. “If you very intentionally bring together a lot of intelligent, interesting and fun people who are all interested in completely diverse things, you will get really cool discussions and interactions.”
Along the way, he also had “dear friends” and found real colleagues. During the group's monthly meetings with the dean of the SCC Dan Huttenlocher and the assistant dean Asu Ozdaglar, who is also the head of the EEC department, UAG members openly speak of the challenges in student experience and offer recommendations to customers of the whole institute, such as teachers who develop new courses and are looking for students.
“This group is unique in the sense that it is a direct communication line with the leadership of the college,” explains Caren. “They take time in their incredibly busy schedules to explain to us where the holes are and what are the needs of students, directly from our experiences.”
“Group students are very interested in IT and AI, in particular the way in which these areas connect with other disciplines. They are also passionate about MIT and eager to improve the undergraduate experience. Hearing their point of view is refreshing – their honesty and feedback have been incredibly useful to me as Dean, ”explains Huttenlocher.
“Meeting students every month is a real pleasure. UAG has been an invaluable space to understand the experience of students more deeply. They engage with computer science in various ways through the MIT, so their contribution to the program and the wider collegial problems have been insightful, ”explains Ozdaglar.
Ellen Rushman, the head of the UAG program, said that “Asu and Dan have done incredible work by cultivating a space in which students feel safe to evoke things that are not positive all the time.” The group's suggestions are also often implemented.
For example, in 2021, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the architects designing the new SCC buildingpresented their renderings at a UAG meeting to request students' comments. Their original provision of interiors offered very little hybrid study and meeting stands which are so popular in the hall of the first floor today.
Hear strong UAG opinions on the type of open community construction spaces that students really appreciated one of the things that created the change in the current floor plan. “It's super cool to enter the personalized space and see it constantly used and always crowded. I feel really happy when I cannot get a table, ”explains Caren, who has just ended his mandate as co -president of the group in preparation for obtaining the diploma.
The co -president of Caren, the higher senior, Julia Schneider, who is in double artificial intelligence, decision -making and mathematics, joined the UAG in the first year to better know more about the mission of the college to promote interpretimentary collaborations.
“Since I have been a student in electrical engineering and computer science, but I carry out research in mechanical engineering on robotics, the mission of the college to promote inter -ministerial collaborations and to unite them by IT has really talked to my personal experiences during my first year at MIT,” explains Schneider.
During his stay on the UAG, the members joined sub-groups focused on the achievement of various programmatic objectives of the college, such as the conservation of a series of public conferences for the academic year 2025-26 to give students of MIT an exhibition to teachers who conduct research in other disciplines that relate to IT.
During a meeting, after hearing how difficult it is for students to understand all the possible courses to follow during their mandate, Schneider and certain UAG peers have formed a subgroup to find a solution.
The students agreed that some of the best courses they had taken at the MIT, or pairs of lessons that really affected their agreement with their interdisciplinary interests, came because they spoke to master's classes and obtained recommendations. “This type of tribal knowledge does not really permeate all the way,” explains Schneider.
Over the past six months, Schneider and the sub-group have worked on a course visualization website, Nerdxing, which has emerged from these discussions.
Guided by Rob Miller, a distinguished professor of computer science in the EEC, the subgroup has used a set of data registration data during the CEE in the last decade to develop a type of tool different from that which MIT students generally use, like Courseroad and others.
Miller, who regularly attends the UAG meetings in his role as education manager for the cross initiative of the college, Commitment ground for computer educationComment: “The really cool idea here is to help students find paths that have been taken by other people who are like them – not only interested in IT, but perhaps also in biology, music, or economics, or neuroscience. It is a lot in the minds of the IT college – by applying data methods focused on data, in support of students with large calculation interests. ”
Opening the Nerdxing driver, which should take place later this spring, Schneider gave a demo. She explains that if you are a major computer (CS) and want to create potential visual courses for you, after selecting your major and a class of interest, you can extend a huge graphic presenting all the possible courses that your CS peers have followed the last decade.
She clicked on class 18,404 (theory of calculation) as a starting class of interest, which led to class 6,7900 (automatic learning), then unexpectedly at 21m.302 (Harmony and Counterpoint II), an advanced music class.
“You are starting to see aggregated statistics that tell you how many students have taken each course, and you can reduce it more to see the most popular courses in CS or follow red points between courses to see the sequence typical of the courses followed.”
By becoming granular on the graph, users are starting to see lessons they have probably never heard of in their program. “I think one of the reasons you come to be MIT is being able to take nice things just like that,” says Schneider.
The tool aims to show students how they can choose classes that go far beyond the simple achievement of diploma requirements. This is only an example of how UAG allows students to strengthen college and the experiences it offers them.
“We are MIT students. We have the skills necessary to create solutions, ”explains Schneider. “This group of people not only evokes ways that things could be better, but we take it in hand to repair things.”
