go bold

A recent post about the death of 6.001 caught my attention earlier today, and I’ve been stuck composing this blog post in my head for awhile.

As one of many MIT Course 6 students who took 6.001, I’m crushed they’ve been changing the curriculum. When it happened, student speculation ran along the lines of – enrollment in Course 6 has been dropping since the introduction of Course 20 (Biological Engineering). And because 6.001 was so heavily CS-oriented, the department didn’t want to continue losing the set of students who were turned off by the lack of hands-on appeal – so they wanted to make the class more accessible and exciting to the largest number of students.

While, from what I’ve seen and of 6.01, the class lacks not only the pure coolness of Scheme versus Python, but also 1) the ability to even the playing field for students, regardless of their previous programming knowledge, 2) the radically different way of thinking about computer programming that Scheme and SICP provided, and 3) an actual solid grounding in thinking about problems computationally and breaking them down. (One of the upsides I think I would have appreciated, however, is the ability to put an industry-relevant language on my resume. “Scheme” got a lot more raised eyebrows than job offers.)

What MIT offers now for those looking for CS grounding is an “intro intro” course called 6.00 – a class required for Course 20 but not for Course 6, and a class designed specifically  to teach students how to think computationally and design software programs. 6.00 covers CS basics from recursion to performance to basic Big-O notation. Part of me wishes this class was included in the required curriculum, and part of me thinks it would be too easy / a waste of time for those who have programmed in the past.

I wonder whether this argument boils down to – how should students learn? By learning the basics and theory (math, physics, basic CS classes like 6.001 / 6.00), or by exciting students first by offering hands-on classes and lots of options (6.01, removing 8.02, the E&M class, from the General Institute Requirements, etc.). Unfortunately, the latter approach feels like MIT is relaxing its standards for its students – trying to make things exciting now so that students stick with the program, instead of building a solid foundation for later… and if that’s true, it’s not a trend I’m comfortable with.

For more discussion – the original Hacker News thread here (which actually links the article at the top of this post. How circular!)

Edit: A great point (from a MIT ’08 sitting right in front of me in class, incidentally) made in an identical thread a month+ ago –

I think there’s something else here, implicit in Sussman’s comment, that’s important. MIT was founded on a philosophy of practicality, and everything else is secondary. If you couple that with the belief that fundamental computer science is the most efficient way to enhance practical software engineering, Scheme was a wonderful choice…

Python (and, frankly, a number of the scripting languages-turned-mainstream) combines this clarity of computer science with a practicality that Scheme never had. If you can convey 95% of the basic ideas in Python, and you can also open the door to learning how to deal with 3rd party code, you’d be a fool not to. It was never about programming purity anyway, so there’s no reason to mourn the passing of Scheme. It’s progress.

I got into an extended argument the other day with a friend who made the claim, “MIT does an awful job of making sure its students know what they want to do after graduation.”

Another graduating senior choosing to pursue the one-year Master’s of Engineering next year (like most, to have some extra time to discover his career interests and direction), he is dissatisfied with how MIT has guided him along his path to graduation. A sound bite of his I can’t seem to forget: “I know less about what I want to do now than I did when I entered MIT.”

It makes me laugh, this sense of entitlement – the idea that a student enters this prestigious institution, often and widely advertised by its “huge range of opportunities,” and expect to be helped and told what he or she specifically is passionate about. The discovery of one’s interests, one’s passions, one’s desired area of expertise – these pursuits seem to need to be by definition self-driven.

Figuring out what you want to do with your life is a problem to deal with every year of your life, as priorities and interests change. It should be something to constantly search for, lest you find yourself at a point in your life dissatisfied and unfocused. As a student, it’s not the Institute’s responsibility to guide you. Provide lots of information and resources, yes – guide you and direct you, never.

It’s your responsibility to try our internships and research opportunities, to take an interesting range of classes, and to explore your field (academically and in the industry) as much as possible.

One other interesting viewpoint that came up when I discussed this with another friend was – MIT does an amazing job of challenging preconceptions. Plenty of pre-med majors are made un-pre-med by the Institute, simply because MIT makes them ask themselves, “Do I really want to do this? Do I really want to be a doctor (and go through this pain of being pre-med), or is this just something I’ve expected to do?” And I think that’s a positive thing – being forced to, as I mentioned earlier, constantly reexamine your own goals and expectations for yourself.

This is the time to explore – this is the time to discover yourself, and let your interests flourish. Why would you allow that responsibility to anybody but yourself?

I was hoping I’d be exempt from having to find a summer gig this year, counting on being able to just work on my Master’s and get paid through the department. Apparently not – I’ve got no funding and get to find my own way. Know anyone small hiring summers and doing exciting things in email / analytics / events? :)

I want to do everything. The reason people go to MIT and the curse of the Institution: exposing its students to so much of what is being used, worked on, developed — what has been done, and what can be done.

We’re all surrounded, constantly, by what seems like a neverending supply of incredibly ambitious and brilliant peers – how can we not get distracted?

I’d like to be really damn good at one thing – be it a thorough knowledge of each Javascript library and its pros and cons, or being able to quickly sketch out interfaces to complex multithreaded Java code, or being able to toss off 15 reasons I like Python more than PHP or why Ruby on Rails has saved the Internet. Maybe it’s just that everyone who’s been presented to me as someone to look up to has been really good at one thing, and I’m responding to that.

But I also want to do everything. I want to know everything, I want to mess around with Javascript and JQuery one minute, experiment with Django the next, poke around to see what procmail can do, hack together a visualizer for my scattered Adium logs… I want to drink everything in and there’s just not enough time.

How do people focus? How do you choose to focus – and how many people were forced to focus  on one thing, then lost track of the others?

It’s almost more comforting believing that there aren’t. It’s kind of shocking to find out that someone actually followed up on the cards I handed out at SXSW… but why did I do it, if I wasn’t expecting that people would?

Life at MIT is, as usual, overwhelming and slightly smothering — but also dynamic, exciting, and inspiring. I get to write papers on the culture around text messaging for my Comparative Media Studies class with Henry Jenkins, and to spend hours upon hours with three guys just putting together the module dependency diagram for my software lab’s final project. Sometimes I think all it’d take for everyone to be immediately more cheerful is some sun and warmth to the air outside. Soon enough — spring had better be the hell on its way.