MIT SDM - The Commuter Student Experience

Break and Summer Session

2008-06-02T14:02:00.003-04:00

Classes ended May16th and now we have a break till June 9th when the summer session starts. I am very happy about the break, get to recharge a bit and basically do nothing:-)) Summer session is supposed to short and interesting. There are not many courses offered in the summer, we have 4 course offered through SDM, they are
ESD.763 Operations & Supply Chain Management
15.514 Financial and Managerial Accounting
ESD.74 System Dynamics for Engineers
ESD. 33 Systems Engineering.
I am taking ESD.33 and 15.514, the schedule makes it hard for us part timers to take more than 2 courses in the summer and anyways I have to leave something for the next summer:-).

H2 Courses - Reflection

2008-06-02T13:11:00.011-04:00

(15.905) Technology Strategy for SDM
Lots of case studies and lots of work. This was my first class with case studies, if you have previous experience with case studies this class might flow much smoother. The case studies with the recommended readings can take up 8 hours every week. If a short paper is due that week then you will end up spending almost 12-16 hours working on this course. The cases and the recommended readings are very interesting but with the other courses and work it gets very challenging and this course is worth only 6 credits. At MIT the way the credit system works is as follows, if you have a 6 credit course then the that is the amount of hours they think you will spend per week on that course. So Tech Strategy had 3 hours of class sessions so that would mean that 3 more hours of homework, but as I mentioned earlier it was more like a 12 credit course. The good news for future students is that they are going to make this a full term course going forward. The Professor Michael Davies is very passionate and fun person to learn from.
The course deliverables were 3 short papers and one long paper on a technology of our choice. We had to work in groups of 3-5 people. There was paper due every two weeks and 2 cases per week. The cases gave us the framework of what to write for the papers. We chose WiMax as our technology and it was interesting to apply what we learned in class to our technology. The following picture gives the general idea of what is taught in the course.(ESD 762) System Optimization

"This course provides an introduction to computer-based models for decision making. The emphasis is on models that are widely used in diverse industries and functional areas, including finance, accounting, operations, and marketing. Applications will include production planning, supply chain management, foreign exchange and commodity trading, asset-liability management, portfolio optimization, corporate risk management, and yield management, among others. The aim of the course is to help students become intelligent consumers of these methods. To this end, the course will cover the basic elements of modeling -- how to formulate a model and how to use and interpret the information a model produces. The course will attempt to instill a critical viewpoint towards decision models, recognizing that they are powerful but limited tools." - From the course syllabus. The course was interesting and the last lecture was excellent since its showed how the methods taught were widely used in real world environments albeit in a much more complicated fashion.

ERBA done

2008-05-05T11:17:00.003-04:00

ERBA is over, you know it is a big deal when Leigh organized a " Demise of ERBA" party:-). I could not attend since there are many other courses which are alive and kicking. I will post more about those courses (Technology strategy and Systems Optimization) once this semester ends. The semester ends around May 15th, we have a 2-3 week break and then the summer session starts in June. I cannot wait for the break. The ERBA tests were extremely easy when compared to the tests from previous years, I am not sure what to make of it. As always with easy tests I made stupid mistakes. Technology strategy takes up a lot of time, system optimization was ok in the beginning but has picked up, good timing since ERBA is over.

H1 courses - thoughts

2008-04-08T15:08:00.006-04:00

15.980 (Organizing For Innovative Product Development)
Professor Tom Allen calls himself the Chief entertainer and he more than lived up to his reputation. The class dealt with knowledge transfer, knowledge gatekeepers, relationships between distance and communication, dual ladder approach and matrix organization and how the knowledge of these things and tweaking it the right way will help product innovation. There is no one right answer but based on your circumstances and the knowledge of the above factors you might be able to make a difference. This concepts taught in this course will help me sometime in the future but for now it did make me more aware of my current surroundings and organizational structure. The course had recommended readings every week and in the final week we had to write a paper and give a presentation on one of the topics taught in the class

15.969 (User-Centered Innovation in the Internet Age)
Professor Eric Von Hippel is well know for developing the concept of user innovation. He introduced the lead user method that can be used to systematically learn about user innovation in order to apply it in new product development. The class also talks about toolkits for facilitating lead user innovation, corporate resistance to user innovation, open source community and how companies make money from open source. The 6 guest lecturers we had also added to the course experience. This course had recommended readings and 2 papers due at the end of the term. One paper focused on PDP and the other paper could be on any one of the topics taught in class. It was a fun course. The 2 papers help a lot in getting a deeper understanding of the course.

There is one thing I would like to see both of these courses do. A sizable portion of the class grade should include class participation. This will get everyone involved instead of a few and get all the students to read the recommended readings. As Professor Ed Crawley would agree an incentive based system works.

Guest Speakers

2008-04-08T14:56:00.002-04:00

We have had guest lecturers in every class so far. The lecturers are mostly people from the industry and they tie the things taught in class wonderfully with their real world experience. We even had a Guest lecturer for ERBA, Ian Livett from BP talked about risks benefit analysis in the oil industry. For Professor Von Hippel's course (15.969) we must have had at least 6 guest speakers. All the speakers were very interesting and highly accomplished, the guest speakers enhance the course experience. If you are a full time student at MIT and have time, then I think you can listen to an accomplished person every day.

Spring H1 reflections - Time constraints

2008-04-08T14:41:00.004-04:00

Its been extremely busy lately. I have used the term "I have no time" loosely a lot in my life but after I started SDM I really know what that exactly means. January boot camp was bad but this H2 session might turn out to be as bad as January.

First I would like to share my H1 schedule, since most of the courses in H1 are the standard fare might be useful for future students. I had 3 courses in H1 and I had class everyday of the week. 2 classes were split into two 90 minute sessions (ERBA, 15.980) and one class was a full 3 hour session(15.969). The morning classes typically start at 9.30 or 10.00 and are over by 11.00/11.30. The Friday class was right in the middle of the day at 1.00. It was hard to accommodate with the work schedule. Weekends were relatively ok during H1, ERBA did take up most of the time but it went well with the other 2 courses which were not very time consuming till the last 2 weeks when we had 3 papers due. So in short Jan was hectic, Feb was good, March and so far April have been very hectic. When I say Feb was good it is relative to Jan, compared to any other month in the last few years of my life Feb would have been wicked hectic :-)

Spring Break

2008-03-24T08:11:00.002-04:00

Finally a break in the proceedings. I have this week off from school. I am done with 2 of my courses and I start 2 new ones starting next Monday, ERBA continues till end of April. The general consensus seems to be that the new courses are way harder than the ones I just finished. If that is true the next two months will be like the last 2-3 weeks of the term. The 2 new courses are 15.905 Technology Strategy and ESD.762 Systems Optimization. Both the courses are supposed to be very interesting.

No Time to Blog

2008-03-17T13:42:00.002-04:00

This past couple of weeks have been very busy. Done with the first ERBA quiz, was easier than expected, that means the grading is going to be hard - bad news for me especially with my horrible handwriting. Have papers due for 15.969 and 15.980 this week and also a presentation for 15.980. Next week is spring break which should help ease this pressure.

View of things

2008-03-05T19:26:00.003-05:00

So far all the SDM courses have been very interesting. I am still trying to find ways to utilize the stuff I learn at school here at work. When you first get back from the January session thats what happens, you have all these ideas in your head and you look for ways to apply those ideas. I guess your success depends on your workplace. But one thing which happens for sure is that you are more informed about your surroundings, some of the classes, papers and assignments get you to analyze the organization, the work you do and your interactions . Awareness of your organizational surroundings keeps you more involved and motivated.

Context Switching

2008-03-05T19:17:00.002-05:00

The hardest part being a commuter student is context switching. I have classes in the morning most days and then I get to work. Once I get to work I have to stop thinking about my ERBA assignments and the papers due from my other course. Now is definitely not a good time -- all the stuff due at school is coupled with the end of quarter at work. Efficiency is the key:-). The driving up and down does not help, on the brighter side my work hours are offset so I hit no traffic when I get to work or when I go home. There is always a brighter side just have to look hard, very hard sometimes:-)

Working in groups

2008-02-26T18:37:00.002-05:00

We have an ERBA assignment every week. I have been working with Yulia and Nitin on those assignments. We all do the assignments separately and then crosscheck our answers. Yulia and Nitin are great to work with. The biggest problem with our team is that we are all very eager to be the first ones to finish the assignments:-) A good problem to have.

This is where the January session helps, in figuring out who you can work with. For Tom Allen's course we have a group paper due at the end of the term. We decided to do a DC1 group reunion sort off - John, Nitin, Yulia and I will be working together on that paper. The papers for Von Hippel's course are individual papers, so I am on my own.

The ERBA debate

2008-02-21T17:10:00.005-05:00

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.

Thoughts on Distance students

2008-02-21T16:55:00.007-05:00

As I mentioned SDM degree has 3 flavors the on-campus student, the commuter student (moi) and the distance student. The distance students join the class via video conferencing, this enables them to ask questions and participate in the class. But somehow it feels disconnected, the voice and picture quality are not great. I have talked to some distance students and they say that sometimes they cannot hear the comments or questions from other students in the class and they are pretty much on their own when it comes to doing homework assignments. Lately we are also experiencing dropped calls, so we lose them in the middle of the class and then they have to reconnect, all this must be very frustrating I guess. Sergey is a distance student and these are his thoughts on the subject.

On campus and commuter have their own pros and cons. The on campus folks can attend all the cool things which happen practically everyday on campus, MIT has lots of distinguished speakers on campus every week. But they have to finish the program with a thesis in 13 months, that is very hectic. The commuter student on the other hand is around for 2 years, but he or she cannot attend most of the campus events unless it is at night and the work and school schedule is pretty hectic. But there is one big plus for the commuter and distance students they are still getting paid:-)), which helps a lot.

So far so good

2008-02-19T13:14:00.002-05:00

School in the morning, work till late evening and then hw and readings that is my schedule. So far the course workload has been manageable, especially with working full time. ERBA has the potential to turn vicious anytime, 15.969 has 2 papers due in a month and that might sneak up on me if I don't pay attention. Last week Professor Von Hippel had 2 speakers - Dr Nat Sims from MGH and Harry West, VP of Continuum. Both speakers were very interesting and engaging. Dr Sims is a lead user and Harry West's company, Continuum is a design and innovation consultancy.

Spring courses so far

2008-02-11T14:16:00.000-05:00

15.980 - Professor Tom Allen talked about technology transfer. The discussion centered around Origination of technical ideas. The 3 main sources are literature, talking to people inside the company and talking to experts outside. The gist - most of the ideas (quantity) generated by speaking to experts out of the company but quality of the ideas generated by talking to people inside the company far outweighs that of the outside experts.
15.969 - Professor Eric Von Hippel informed us that most of the products and services are actually developed by the users who then give these ideas to the manufacturers. He talked by how we can study lead users from our industry and other industries and apply it to new product development - Lead user method.

Relay Video DC1

2008-02-10T13:08:00.000-05:00

Archery Video from DC1

2008-02-10T12:56:00.000-05:00

Here is a clip of our robot shooting the board down. We had some problems with the surface, so John had to manually turn the robot around. Ideally the ultrasound sensors would have found the target and the robot would have turned and fired.

Spring Semester Begins

2008-02-08T07:15:00.000-05:00

Got back to work end of last week. The spring semester started this week. I have registered for 5 courses. The spring schedule is split into 2, some courses are in the first half and the rest in the second. The courses I have registered for are the following

ESD. 721 Engineering Risk Benefit Analysis (ERBA)
15.980 Organizing for Innovative Product development
15.969 User centered innovation in the Internet age
15.905 Technology Strategy
ESD. 762 Systems Optimization

ERBA is a longer course and runs through till end of April. 15.980, 15.969 are in the first half and 15.905 and ESD. 762 are in the second half. All the courses which start with 15 are Sloan courses. SDM students can register for only 2 Sloan electives. The above mentioned Sloan courses (except 15.980) are the foundation courses and are specifically tailored towards SDM students, they do not count towards our Sloan limit.

January Session- Courses

2008-02-07T18:21:00.000-05:00

We had 3 course System Architecture, Human Side of Technology and Probability & Statistics
System Architecture is taught by Professor Crawley. 25% of the course is taught in Jan and the rest in Fall. The class assignments actually hurt the brain and do take a lot of time and effort. Professor Crawley said that was the aim of the assignments. According to him the brain hurts when new pathways are established between the neurons. I hope I did not damage any of my previously established paths in the process:-)) The course made more sense as time went along. All the SDM07's I have spoken to, said that most of it will make sense by the end of December. In the last class Professor Crawley explained how he applied the principles of System Architecture to design the SDM program, I found that very interesting.
Human Side of Technology is taught by Professor Ralph Katz. He is very funny and entertaining. The class was scheduled from 2.00 to 5.00, ideal nap time but his class is so interesting I did not nod off even once. He has hundreds of real world examples to support each one of his theories. His book for the course is also every interesting to read.
Probability and statistics is taught by Professor Jeremy Orloff and is a refresher course. The assignments are good to knock of the rust. We need a lot of prob and stats for the Engineering and Risk Benefits Analysis course (ERBA).

January Session -DC2 Global Warming

2008-02-07T17:45:00.000-05:00

The day DC1 was over we were handed out the DC2 assignment. We could chose between Fixing Global warming or Nutrition. We were assigned to new teams. My DC2 team members Maya, Leigh, Marcia, Luke, Albert and Devadas. It was hard to get along in the beginning, I guess everyone was kind of sad leaving their DC1 teams. As days progressed we worked well together. I got along well with everyone, they were all very interesting people and I can a learn a lot from all of them. Leigh was the resident fashion expert and a chemical engineer. Albert is a plastic surgeon, as can been seen from my picture I need a lot of help in that department. Maya and Devadas worked for big companies and have years of wisdom to share. Marcia was from Ford Mexico, she gave us interesting insights into the automotive field and Mexico. Luke is from the Airforce, he was our fearless leader, he kept us on track:-). He has been in the SDM program for 6 months so he knows a lot more than the rest of us. Under his guidance we decided to follow the System Architecture approach to fix Global warming. The deliverables were a 60 second elevator speech , 20-25 minute presentation, and a technical write up on ‘Global Warming’.

January Session - DC1 Robo Olympics

2008-02-07T16:32:00.000-05:00

The first day of school we got assigned to teams. My team had six people - Yulia, Thuy, John, Nitin and Eli. We were given the project requirements and assigned a room to work in. I have know John for sometime , the first time we met was at the SDM information session in June, I was happy that I knew someone in the group. The group got along very well. I think when they changed the group for DC2 I experienced withdrawal symptoms:-)) The group building exercise we had the next day helped in bringing the group closer. Nitin is the math god and he is great at coding. Eli was our Lego building expert, John was the master of the archery design and the group's Simon:-), Yulia was in charge of the opening theatrics and Thuy was the synchronized dance master. The DC1 challenge was Robo Olympics
Robots have to participate in 5 different competitions:
1) Opening Ceremony
2) Archery
3) Relay Race
4) Tug-of-war
5) Synchronized dancing
The whole design process was a lot of fun. Quick thoughts
Don't try to do too much, try to keep it simple
With 6 people in a group it is very hard to find a "cool" task for everyone.
Work with other groups.
Our robot did not perform as well as expected, but we were all very happy with the effort we put into it:-))

January Session - The rumors are true

2008-02-07T15:55:00.001-05:00

For prospective students whatever you heard about the January session is true. It is a mental boot camp. But on the bright side it is January in Boston, it is miserably cold outside so staying indoors learning all this cool stuff is fun. Its almost 12-14 hours of work everyday for the whole month. I know when I first heard this I thought people are exaggerating, how bad can it be. It is bad, especially in the beginning it can get very busy. It is so busy the first two weeks or so, that later on 12 hours a day seems like a good day. But now looking back on the whole experience it was lots of fun. I would have liked a bit more sleep, but I was always excited to get back to school every morning for more torture.
Every project is done in assigned groups. After spending 12 hours+ with the group you get to know the team members a lot better. Apart from the obvious benefits, the biggest aim of the January session is cohort building. Look out for folks you get along with so that you can team up with them for future projects. Along the way you might make many FLFs (Friends for life) :-)

Better late than never

2008-02-07T15:41:00.001-05:00

Should have started this blog last month, but it is not too late. I am enrolled in the System Design and Management program at MIT. I am 24 month commuter student. Basically that means I work and go part time to school. Gradually as time progresses and I learn more management stuff you will notice a change in my vocabulary . This should end up being a "Holistic powerful blog":-) . So stay tuned for the "Pearls of wisdom " (stolen from Professor Katz).