Throughout his first yr at MIT in 2021, Matthew Caren ’25 acquired an intriguing electronic mail inviting college students to use to turn out to be members of the MIT Schwarzman School of Computing’s (SCC) Undergraduate Advisory Group (UAG). He instantly shot off an software.
Caren is a jazz musician who majored in pc 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 tutorial 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 pc science (EECS) and different computing-related packages. They advise the school’s management on points, supply constructive suggestions, and function a sounding board for revolutionary new concepts.
“The ethos of the UAG is the ethos of the school itself,” Caren explains. “Should you very deliberately deliver collectively a bunch of good, fascinating, fun-to-be-around people who find themselves all thinking about utterly various issues, you will get some actually cool discussions and interactions out of it.”
Alongside the best way, 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 also be the division head of EECS, UAG members communicate overtly about challenges within the pupil expertise and supply suggestions to friends from throughout the Institute, reminiscent of college who’re creating new programs and in search of 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 elucidate the place the holes are, and what college students’ wants are, immediately from our experiences.”
“The scholars within the group are keenly thinking about pc science and AI, particularly how these fields join with different disciplines. They’re additionally keen about 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 area 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 school points has been insightful,” Ozdaglar says.
UAG program supervisor Ellen Rushman says that “Asu and Dan have carried out a tremendous job cultivating an area by which college students really feel secure mentioning issues that aren’t constructive on a regular basis.” The group’s recommendations are often 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 authentic interiors format provided only a few of the hybrid examine and assembly cubicles which are so standard in immediately’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 area and seeing it continually being in use and at all times crowded. I really really feel blissful 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 school’s mission of fostering interdepartmental collaborations.
“Since I’m a pupil in electrical engineering and pc science, however I conduct analysis in mechanical engineering on robotics, the school’s mission of fostering interdepartmental collaborations and uniting them via computing actually spoke to my private experiences in my first yr at MIT,” Schneider says.
Throughout her time on the UAG, members have joined subgroups targeted round attaining completely different programmatic targets of the school, reminiscent of curating a public lecture sequence for the 2025-26 tutorial yr to present MIT college students publicity to college who conduct analysis in different disciplines that relate to computing.
At one assembly, after listening to how difficult it’s for college students to know all of the doable programs to take throughout their tenure, Schneider and a few UAG friends shaped a subgroup to discover a resolution.
The scholars agreed that a number 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 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 distinct sort of software than MIT college students sometimes use, reminiscent of CourseRoad and others.
Miller, who commonly attends the UAG conferences in his function because the schooling officer for the school’s cross-cutting initiative, Common Ground for Computing Education, 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 thinking about pc 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 assist 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 possibly can broaden 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’ll additional pare it right down to see the preferred programs in CS or observe traces of purple dots between programs to see the standard sequence of courses taken.”
By getting granular on the graph, customers start to see courses that they’ve in all probability 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 software goals to point out college students how they’ll 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 presents 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 by which issues could possibly be higher, however we take it into our personal fingers to make things better.”
