During the first year at the myth in 2021, Matthew Caren '25 received the intriguing E -Mile inviting students to submit a request to become members of the myth of Schwarzman College of Computing's (SCC) Bachelor's advisory group (UAG). He fired the application immediately.
Caren is a jazz musician who specialized in computer science and engineering, as well as in music and theater art. He was attracted to the university due to focusing at the intersections between computers, engineering, art and other academic classes. Caron was impatiently joined by UAG and remained on it for four years in myth.
For the first time created in April 2020, the group gathers a committee consisting of about 25 students representing a wide swath of both traditional and Mixed main directions in electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) and other calculations related to calculations. They advise university leadership in matters, offer constructive feedback and serve as a probe board for new innovative ideas.
“Ethos UAG is the ethos of the university itself,” explains Caren. “If you deliberately gather a group of intelligent, interesting, funny people who are interested in completely diverse things, you will receive really cool discussions and interactions.”
Along the way, he also met “dear” friends and found real colleagues. In the monthly meetings of the group with Dean Dan Huttenlocher and deputy Dean Asu Zaękiejaglar, who is also the head of the ECS department, UAG members openly talk about challenges in student experience and offer recommendations to guests from the whole of the Institute, such as the faculty, which develops new courses and seek payment of students.
“This group is unique in the sense that it is a direct communication line with university leadership,” says Caren. “They have time in their incredibly tense schedules to explain where the holes are and what are the needs of students directly from our experiences.”
“Students in the group are very interested in computer science and artificial intelligence, especially how these areas combine with other disciplines. The myth and willing to improve bachelor's experiences. Listening to their perspective is refreshing – their honesty and opinions were extremely helpful to me as a dean,” says Huttenlocher.
“Meeting with students every month is a real pleasure. UAG was an invaluable space to deeper understanding of students' experience. They are involved in a computer in a variety of myth, so their contribution to the curriculum and wider problems of the university were insightful,” says Zażaglar.
The head of the UAG program, Ellen Rushman, says that “Asu and Dan did an amazing job, cultivating the space in which students feel safe, raising things that are not positive.” Group suggestions are also often implemented.
For example, in 2021 Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, architects designing the new SCC building, presented their renderings at the UAG meeting to ask for students' opinion. Their original interior layout offered very few hybrid research and meetings, which are so popular in today's lobby on the first floor.
Hearing strong UAG reviews about open types that build communities that students really valued was one of the things that caused a change in the current floor plan. “It's a super cool entering into a personalized space and seeing how it is still used and always crowded. I actually feel happy when I can't get a table,” says Caren, who just finished his term as co -chairman of the group as part of the preparation to graduate from school.
Carena co -chairman, the rising older Julia Schneider, who doubles in artificial intelligence and making decisions and mathematics, joined UAG as the first year to understand more about the university's mission to support inter -faculty cooperation.
“Because I am a student of electrical engineering and computer science, but I conduct research in the field of mechanical engineering of robotics, a university mission consisting in supporting inter -faculty cooperation and combining them through calculations, they really talked to my personal experience in my first year in myth,” says Schneider.
During their stay at UAG, members joined the subgroups focusing on achieving different program goals of the university, such as the curator of the public series of lectures for the academic year in 2025–26 to provide students with the myth of lecturers who conduct research in other disciplines related to computers.
At one meeting, after hearing how difficult it is to understand all possible courses during their term, Schneider and some UAG peers created a subgroup to find a solution.
Students agreed that some of the best courses they took to the myth, or a pair of courses that really hit their interdisciplinary interests, appeared because they talked to higher classes and received recommendations. “This kind of tribal knowledge does not really penetrate the whole myth,” explains Schneider.
Over the past six months, Schneider and the subgroup have been working on a website for visualization of courses, Nerdxing, which came out of these discussions.
The subgroup, headed by Rob Miller, a distinguished IT professor in EECS, has used a set of data entries of the ECS course over the past decade to develop a different type of tool than usual use MIT students, such as Courseroad and others.
Miller, who regularly attends UAG meetings in his role of an education officer in the university cross -sectional initiative, Common plane of computing educationComments: “It is a really nice idea to help students find paths that were taken by other people similar to them-not only interested in computer science, but maybe also biology, music, economy or neuronouki. It's very much in the spirit of computational university-the use of computer methods based on data, supporting students with broadly compatible calculation interests.”
Opening the Nerdxing pilot, which is to move later in this spring, Schneider gave a demo. He explains that if you are a specialization in computer science (CS) and you would like to create a visual presentation of potential courses for you, after choosing specialization and interest, you can expand a huge chart showing all possible courses that your CS peers took over your peers over the past decade.
She clicked class 18.404 (calculation theory) as the initial class of interest, which led to class 6.7900 (machine learning), and then unexpectedly to 21.302 (Harmony and CONTROPTENT II), an advanced music class.
“You start to see total statistics that inform how many students took part in each course, and you can continue to use it to see the most popular courses in CS or follow the lines of red dots between the courses to see a typical sequence of classes.”
By becoming detailed on the chart, users begin to see classes that they probably never heard about, as someone spoke in their program. “I think that one of the reasons why you came to the myth is the ability to take cool things exactly such,” says Schneider.
The tool aims to show students how they can choose classes that go far beyond fulfilling the requirements for the diploma. This is just one example of how UAG allows students to strengthen the universities and the experiences they offer.
“We are students of myth. We have the ability to build solutions,” says Schneider. “This group of people not only raises the ways in what things they can be better, but we take it into our hands to fix things.”
