[CMU MISM-BIDA] Attending Graduate School at CMU in Fall 2020
By: Jack Chang
Tags: Self Improvement, Life, Technology, Education, Graduate School

Fall 2020 Class Schedule

The most important part of graduate school is to take classes and learn new knowledge. Since Heinz College provides courses both in business and technology, I’ve decided to take 1 business course and 2 technical courses in the 1st semester. The following are the courses that are on my schedule:

10–601 Introduction to Machine Learning (Master’s) : 0 credit (Audit/Full Semester)

: 0 credit (Audit/Full Semester) 94–700 Organizational Design and Implementation : 6 credits (Mini 1)

: 6 credits (Mini 1) 95–703 Database Management : 12 credits (Full Semester)

: 12 credits (Full Semester) 95–888 Data Focused Python: 6 credits (Mini 2)

Photo by Ilya Pavlov on Unsplash

Maybe one of the most prestigious courses in the school of computer science, I had the chance to unofficial audit the course with permission from professor Pat Virtue. The course had a format of lectures and discussions. Pat frequently hold class polls and let students talk about the questions in break out rooms. The reason why I wanted to take this course is to further the machine learning concepts I learned from my undergraduate studies.

During mini 1, aside from more general ML concepts, we covered decision trees, nearest neighbors, linear regression, logistic regression, and neural networks. I really enjoyed the neural network lectures, in which Pat demonstrated the concepts clearly with pictures of cats! As far as I can tell, constantly building on the foundations in ML is super important. That is why I am preparing to officially take this course in Spring 2021 or even challenge the “10–701 Introduction to Machine Learning (PhD)” version. Who knows?

94–700 Organizational Design and Implementation

I just have to say: “I love this course!” Professor David Lassman did an extremely good job getting students to engage in tons of discussions. Then, ending each with a full-rounded summary. From an international student’s perspective, more talking in the class may be scary at first, but it is definitely a way to practice communication and learn how to explicitly express yourself.

The most important lessons of the course are not just debate and dialogue, but learning how to prosper in organizations, teams, and eventually your career. The thing that I regret the most is finally getting the courage to go to Dave’s office hour. To sum up, whether you are still in university or graduate school like me, I will encourage you (and myself) to go to more office hours! I learned more than I expected while interacting with a Harvard Business School MBA (referring to Dave)!

95–703 Database Management

Professor Janusz Szczypula is a very experienced professor in database management and Oracle. It is just amazing that he has been teaching database management for at least 20+ years. The first half of the course was mainly on ER models, normalization processes, and relational algebra. The class has started SQL in the second half and will be implementing it in the final project. I am setting my sights on passing the Oracle Database SQL | 1Z0–071 in the near future after finishing this course. Apart from class schedules based on Pittsburgh time, the class is held during Australian hours since Janusz is on the Adelaide campus. I have also met wonderful TAs in the course. Overall, though I learned my database systems in MySQL, it’s never bad to add Oracle under my belt!