The fall semester is now in full swing and I’ve learned what the MIT expression “drinking from the fire hose” really means. It’s not about classes – they limit how many credits you can take. It’s about the massive number of other things you can do or see on any given day at any given time. There is so much buzz here, the place seems to have its own harmonic!
- the welcome reception for Sloan alumni (expecting large turn-out due to it being 75th anniversary of Sloan Fellows and 25th anniversary of Management of Technology program) http://mitsloan.mit.edu/alumni/convocation2005/e-main.php
- a dinner with the folks from the Media Lab to talk about ideas for the campus-wide “$50K” entrepreneurship competition (remember them from earlier email, the people with the concept car http://www.media.mit.edu/events/di-2004-10-22/wjm2004-1022.pdf ) and cognizant robots (http://www.media.mit.edu/cogmac/robotsandsims.html)
- a thesis defense on Routing Tradeoffs in Dynamic Peer-to-peer Networks (not for everyone, I know, but it promises to be an interesting discussion of distributed hash tables)
- the weekly meeting of TechLink – the graduate group that links the business students with the tech students
- “The Past, Present and Future of Women in Science” by a distinguished researcher from Yale (author: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0309065682/102-9839959-3459342?v=glance)
- A partner from McKinsey talking about venture capital
I’ve decided to split my time between the first two. Today, if I move fast enough, I can see a world-renowned campus designer, followed by the CTO of Sun Microsystems, and attend a meeting of entrepreneurs on a new cell phone service, all within 4 hours!
My classes for fall are terrific. The required courses are Managing Technical Innovation & Entrepreneurship; Strategic Management (http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Sloan-School-of-Management/15-902Strategic-Management-IFall2002/CourseHome/ ); and two seminars on Leadership (one where we learn models and talk about our experiences; one where we listen to nationally/internationally successful leaders). In addition, I’m taking a course that will teach me how to write a proper Business Plan when seeking venture capital. I’m also supposed to be working on my thesis, but am not quite organized for that yet; should have something interesting to say next month!
For those who knew me as a student in an earlier life, you’ll be surprised to find out that I’m attending all of my classes plus two additional ones not for credit – an Architecture/Urban Planning course on planning/building the university (or any major research institute); an ongoing research seminar in IT management – so far focused on lots of data integration, harmonization, context mediation issues.
The big news, though, is that I am living my MIT fantasy. On my hope-to-do list was to meet Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the web. (No Al Gore jokes, please.) This is the man who came up with the “www” and “http” concept which make it possible for us to move so efficiently through so many people’s information and who has been knighted by the Queen of England. Better than meeting him, I ended up with a job working for him!
His organization, W3C - the World Wide Web consortium (http://www.w3.org/ ) - has one of its three offices on campus. The next generation of internet is called Semantic Web and, in part, will us to move from searching/retrieving documents to using rules-based logic to grant access to data. He has started a group that has been joking called the R&D department of W3C at MIT’s Computer Science/Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL: http://www.csail.mit.edu/index.php). He has started a project there looking at how to implement policy rules and how, after the fact, to use automated rules logic to have transparency and accountability for actions taken (http://groups.csail.mit.edu/dig/ ) . By a stroke of incredible good fortune, someone heard a brief talk I gave explaining work I was doing for the government this year and thought I would be a good fit for the project to look at using these tools for law and government. So, in addition to being a student, I am now a Research Assistant at CSAIL.
Life couldn’t be better – unless I could figure out how to give up sleeping or to teleport so I could spend more free time with Matt J
