The ERBA debate

ERBA is taught by Professor Apostolakis. He knows his stuff and loves it. He has his own sense of humor and some of the statements are pretty funny. The big debate is whether ERBA should be a required course. The first day of class the Professor said that the methods taught cannot be applied to software, I think that prompted some folks to drop the course and take up some other class. The things covered so far are indicator variables, reliability block diagrams, cut sets, Poisson, binomial, exponential distribution etc. Last week the professor started talking about the mean time to failure(MTTF) and the bathtub curve, I found it very interesting. From my point of view, engineers should have a basic understanding of all these things, but if this course was not a required course I doubt how many of us would have taken it, the reason being that there are just too many good courses at MIT. As a Sloan student you can also cross register for courses at the Harvard Business School(HBS) and there is no limit on the number of HBS courses you can take - the possibilities are endless as you can see.