Upenn MCIT Program Details and Real Student Experiences - Dr. Arvind Bhusnurmath

thank you for joining me today um taking time out of your day to go over to mcit program and going a little bit more in depth into just the personal perspectives giving it a bit more humanistic touch um so what you want to just start with a quick intro about you as well as ncit sure uh so i've been teaching at penn for the past seven years throughout my time at penn i've been associated with the mjt program when they recruited me they said that i'd be teaching the theoretical like math and algorithms courses for mcit after chris murphy decided to transition to be the director of mcit online they asked me if i'd be interested in being his replacement for the mcit on campus and so for the last well your batch tina was the first batch that was under my directorship so uh yeah it's been i guess two and a half three years uh since i took over as director cool and could you also give us

just like a little bit of information about the mcit program like i know it's split between mcit online and offline um but maybe just like a general introduction so the overall perspective of mcit is there are many folks who did not do computer science in their undergraduate studies went off into the world got a job or maybe didn't even you know get a job during their undergrad but later on in their undergrad they realized that computer science might be something that they'd be interested in and they want to change careers uh how do they do that well our program is the answer i suppose there are other competing programs but they are very few and uh and this is where i'll blow our programs trumpet and say that i think we're the best i think uh in terms of what we try and provide for transitioning from wherever you came from to computer science it's structured quite well it is intense and i'm sure we'll get into that a little bit and i know you know you've been talking about that in other videos that you've recorded uh but if you can handle that first year and kind of grit yourself through that first year where we teach you the fundamentals of computer science then after that what i love is the fact that mcit students in their second year take electives with the regular masters in cs students and the first time that i taught all of this back in 2013 when i joined pen i was like this is ridiculous i don't i will teach them because it's my job but i'm sure they'll be slaughtered in the second year when they go out and compete with the regular computer science masters and that's not true it's just i think it's a testament to just how pretty the mcid students are and yeah i mean like i think our program does prepare folks in the first year reasonably well but um we are trying to get people who are really passionate about making that transition to computer science and that that's kind of the key ingredient that makes it succeed yeah i definitely agree with you i'm also biased because i came out of the program but i think it was first year was really quite rough and i do go into more detail about that in my other videos but after getting through that though like second year felt almost like a breeze you know like after just like struggling from that like zero from going from zero to you know i guess like one and then going on just to do a little bit more second year was just so much easier after that um yeah yes so see so i have a few questions for you um just like looking at my list right now uh so you actually mentioned my second question which is like what is the profile of someone that is good for mcit and you're seeing someone that's like really gritty right

um which is actually a term that was from another pen professor right angela duckworth why do you think penn professors use that term a lot it's like okay well you know he she used it so and she's defined it so if anyone asks me what the definition is it's like you know go read angela's book right so uh yeah uh both sides was there more to that question or is the question basically around like whatever yeah like what's the like profile so you went to that a little bit already about being like gritty um is there any other characteristics you think is a good profile yeah i well so i think at the base level the student needs to have done well in their undergrad and that does that mean a certain gpa cut off yes there is one but i don't think it's like something as ridiculous as you know 3. 8 or something you know i mean basically unachievable uh there's some cutoff for the gre as well but that's so both those cutoffs i'm just mentioning because we get a lot of applications and it's nearly impossible to read every single statement but once you've cleared those cutoffs then what we're looking for is your statement which is where you demonstrate an interest for computer science tell us you know where that interest came from uh i mean this probably is obvious but i'll mention you know statements that say i want computer science because i want money is that might be true but um i mean we're looking for a slightly better reason than that uh then your letters of recommendation also matter i think that any letter of recommendation that points to why this person is making this career transition is always interesting someone who i don't know let's say because we get a lot of people let's say from like finance backgrounds right so very often we get letters of recommendation that talk about the student being very good in finance econ those types of things but even just a little line in there by whoever the recommender might be that attests to this student being someone who can make a transition may not even be like make a transition to computer science but she's pointing out that they can take on challenges and all that uh because i mean there's you saying you the applicant saying you're gritty and then they're professors or your recommenders saying that you're gritty so that combination i think is probably what you're looking for the most yeah for sure especially when you say that grittiness but part of that is passion right you have to have a good enough reason why you're doing this to pull you through where else like when you're attacked by the first year of mcit you're just like oh god like why am i doing this right like do you have that motivation yeah and uh i think the important thing is that everyone who's coming in has an undergraduate degree right so there's so when like when you're doing your undergrad for most of us we in the midst of our undergrad uh we're not really thinking of bailing because we feel that okay we need to have like some degree right we recognize the value of a degree we think that we're probably not going to be employed if we don't have that degree but for most people they might even have been employed before coming to mcit so you know bailing is a potential option but most of them don't build because they're just so convinced that there's going to be like a brighter future if they manage to get through all of this and one of the things i love is uh well i don't want to say that it's harder with undergrads but if you're doing an intro to cs intro to programming rather class with undergraduates i feel that the first week or maybe even the first two weeks are going to spend saying look cs bright beautiful shiny in mcit no one has time for that if you if i walked into my intro to programming class for mcit and said do you know why cs is cool they're like hey arvin stop like teach me java teach me a for loop teach me lead code you know like i know it's tiny i mean i think it's shinier than even you might be thinking about it right so that convictions already happened and that uh that sometimes comes out in the application process itself but uh even if it does even if it's not like super clear and the applicant is selected somehow i think just that atmosphere of like everyone being convinced that this is what they should be doing uh really helps there isn't anyone in mcit who says oh i'm undecided about computer science like you made your decision right like for the next two years this is what you're gonna do yeah yeah and i feel like the application almost forces you to also introspect on that because it's hard to write in personal statement about why you're transitioning into a career if you don't actually know why you're transitioning your career yeah and i feel like

the retention is at least for my year it was really high and we were saying about that community um you know the first is the applicant quality also the community helped a lot because it's you know if you see everybody like hustling around you it's hard for you just be like well i just give up you know it's like there's like that atmosphere yeah i'd like to think that all of us instructors in the first year are trying to you know basically convince people that they can make it uh that the mcit program is collaborative and by that i don't mean that you know work on homeworks together and stuff like that but more from the perspective of let's not compare how quickly you did this homework or you know your marks and stuff like that uh when you've taken my courses we try pretty hard to like not show the curve and say look that tail that's you like you know we we're almost aggressive about like not as teachers not comparing students of course students might do it behind our backs that's obviously like you know what students do i'd like to hope that as the years go by people realize that you're not competing among yourself you're competing among like other people from other programs who want those jobs and all that right so yeah i think the community is good i think people do tend to help each other there might be clusters of friendship but i think overall by the time people finish their first year i would like to believe that every person in mcit has made you know at least three or four solid friends if not more and that they kind of pull each other through yeah and i think that's actually really important as well like as a community and having other people that you're more close with that's really helpful especially when you're you know trying to like cram for something or you know sometimes you just need to like bounce ideas right like especially uh like for 592 like the discrete math course often like the ideas are very abstract and hard to grapple with so having someone to talk about with it can help clear things up in your mind a lot better yeah um yeah let's see

my other question it's like the question that everybody asked and i've been asked this a lot of times as well i'm sure you know what is the difference between fbi d online and on campus uh i don't know if you're on mcit pr just yeah actually you are i am so well if someone's watching this video and if they're an incoming student or even a student that is going to show up like a year and a half from now mci dpr because it's preserved in posterity i mean i put a lot of effort into writing that response and i would say if someone wants like the longer version they should read that response uh chris murphy and i also discussed it you know a little bit before i before i put it out on piazza but the short version of it is i think well on campus you have access to a lot of people and those people include your faculty those people include faculty from other departments like criminology like electrical engineering like wharton and those other departments are places where you yes it might look like you can only do one approved elective but you know one out of ten is still ten percent of your course which is something that the mcit online students can't do at least as we currently speak the access to faculty whether in our cs department or outside cs also means that you could do research with them which might seem like you know shooting at the moon or something like that when you're starting from scratch but uh we've had success stories of people doing research and this is something that i absolutely love about mcit which is that everyone can choose to have a very unique path once they start learning the basics so if someone wants to do a phd after mcit it is possible it's hard how do you get into a phd well i need to do research how do you do research oh sorry if you're mcit online i don't know what the procedure is i'm sure that there's something that they've thought of um but i think it's undeniable that it'll be easier if you're on campus and the last thing is uh and i mean this perhaps is the most important thing because we just talked about that grittiness and like people pulling each other through the process it's far easier to make friends and find your clique and your you know group that you're gonna hang with if you're on campus i think online is possible but you're unlikely to be exposed to everyone which you are on campus your there's only one section per course uh we actively try to ensure that there aren't more than 75 80 people in any incoming mcit cohort even 7580 i think is on the larger side uh 75 80 people all in the same classroom within the first month or so you hopefully and in practice i've also seen this that like most people know who they're going to hang with uh for the next i don't know like month or so online that's hard i'd say one more thing which i mean this is something i am passionate about when it comes to the difference i feel that uh having a live lecture and having the ability to ask a question while you're still processing what the teacher just said is pretty key to understanding any subject mcit online everything is pre-recorded so if you have a teacher saying some complicated formula and the rest is left to the reader well i mean or the listener or the viewer whereas on campus if i said something like that a student might say well i don't get it uh can you show me the next step and it's not just me i think pretty much every mcit on campus instructor will be like yeah okay i'll do the next step which means that lecture at that moment has become unique because that person asked that question whereas the mcit online lecture it's the same can good being stored you know served up you over and over again not saying that the quality is bad or anything like that but it's just that dynamic nature that's there you know on campus experience where you can ask questions and you can also ask your classmates questions i mean i don't know about maybe the modern student is different but when i was in a classroom i always used to be like what did they say like please explain to me you know there's those that whispering that happens in our classroom i think helped me understand and i hope it's something that students still value those are yeah much longer explanation on piazza uh we can link to that for people who are you know part of our program i actually wanted to ask is that piazza a public piazza that people can access to or is it only after they apply it is somewhat public i mean i don't i'm okay with you taking that response and putting it into yeah i don't know like if this was a podcast we'd say show notes or something like that right i don't know where it goes in youtube but if you want to do that you know i'm fine with that okay cool and okay let's do a plug for mcit online why would someone want to what are like the pros of mcit online when they're making it uh yeah so the well this is the this is probably the most controver i wouldn't say controversial but a lot of people view this as the biggest benefit uh it's cheaper it is um yeah i mean facts are facts right so as it currently stands it's about one-third the cost of mcit on campus uh i don't think it's exactly one-third because penn has all of those like taxes and extra fees and all that type of stuff so but but it's still significantly cheaper uh so that's point number one i think the other aspect of it is that because it's online you don't have to move to philadelphia give up your job most people who do mcit online are working as well so if you're doing mcit on campus yes we have some folks who do it part time but most of the people who do mcit on campus part part-time are employed by the university and uh you know so they're already in philadelphia they're just basically going from one building to another when they have to take classes uh mcit online has a much higher percentage of people who take one class a semester and do a job so they they'll take a little bit longer to graduate but they already have a job so i don't think a lot of them are viewing mci mcid online as a stepping stone that they need to take immediately they're okay with spreading it yeah and i think you know even if so the not moving to philadelphia i think also makes it such that you could uh do this degree from basically anywhere in the world uh i suppose i should have mentioned one downside or one comparison between online and on campus if you want to come to the united states immigration all that sort of stuff you need to do the on-campus program but if you're um let's say you're in australia you want to stay in australia you just want a computer science degree from pen while you're in australia do this degree you know you'll get an mcid degree from pen and use it for employment within your own country and i've seen people do that as well very great cool that was a plug for mcit online as well um so it's very useful i think i will say also tina that i think i mean yes the money is a factor uh and yes you know like moving to philadelphia as a factor but uh one thing that i hope students are doing when they're making the decision between the two is asking themselves like what kind of environment helps them study the best because when you're making a career transition like this you want to be able to absorb the material as quickly and as effectively as possible and some people thrive in that classroom environment some people uh prefer learning in their room you know rewinding videos watching them over and over again so yeah that's and both are fine i mean you just be honest to yourself as to like you know which mode works for you yeah i mean in the end you still get an mcit degree from pet right so yeah at the end of the day yeah exactly yeah okay cool um so next question

internships and jobs so um if you have any stats you want to share feel free to but i actually want this to maybe be like a bit more um like maybe stories right like what are some stories that you've seen like successes and struggles of students where any like favorite stories that you've had favorite stories uh okay so i guess i mean this doesn't put into any specific person but uh my favorite stat is that when the mcit students graduate i was looking at whatever survey information we have you know like what job they have on the day that they graduate or actually it's not even when they graduate it's close to graduation about a week or so before graduation we survey them and yeah i mean earlier it used to be just well please fill it out because you're trying to be nice to me then we started bribing them with hoodies and you know the response rate went up um pretty much every student has managed to get a job before they graduated uh and i say pretty much every the actual number from i just was pulling up like the last survey that we had uh i think that was from not your year but you know the previous year and so out of 46 people who filled out the survey there were only three who said they didn't have that they were still looking at the time that they filled out the survey and 43 out of 46 is i mean pretty good uh i also know that the people who said they didn't have a job at that point i know each one of them like personally and i know that they are employed now one of them is employed in you know one of the fancy like fan companies and all that so uh i guess the weight was worth it for them um so yeah so jobs i'm very happy to say it's not been something that people are having an issue with do people worry about it yes i mean they're human they'll worry uh there's this uh this statistic obviously you could pull it out but students start worrying about when they're going to get a job you know am i january i haven't got a job it's february or whatever there's like some expected date by which they they get a job and um i don't know what the average date is i just know that a lot of that worrying seems slightly unnecessary i mean i think just as you know as human students tend to worry but given the success rate uh at least in like the pre-covered era things seem to be okay internships is a different story altogether so i will say that for so there may be telling you some stories is interesting so the overall picture is that a lot of students get internships in companies that are not the so called like cool companies or the fan companies or whatever right but a fair number of them are able to use that as a launch pad to get into the bigger companies so there will be lots of people you know when i ask them what do they do over the summer tell me all this company you might not have heard of them but i had a good time over there i learned a lot and then uh yes they gave me like a full-time offer but i prefer to work for a larger company let's see if i can get that job and most of them do so this i think it's an incorrect assumption and the data also reveals this that you know let's say you want to get a job in microsoft there's a tendency among students to think that oh i can't get a job in microsoft if i didn't intern in microsoft or microsoft equivalent companies um the data seems to suggest that is absolutely not true it is also not true that you need an internship before you can get a full-time job in microsoft right so um i mean in fact i think there was a year where all the students who did not do an internship managed to get a full-time job in amazon or google so you know making all these like connections and correlations and causations well you know you're a data scientist yourself right like they're the evidence isn't there you anecdotes are there but um yeah i mean this is i guess what i'm trying to say is that there's i'm not saying you shouldn't do an internship because if you don't do an internship you get a job in amazon that's stupid as well so uh take that information more as yes it's possible to get an internship don't stress about that and the job is going to be fine a couple of interesting jobs and internships i think over the years i've been fascinated by newer domains that mcit's have cracked into so i think in 2013 2014 when people graduate like my first year with fcit a lot of folks were looking at you know the amazon facebook microsoft type of companies uh obviously some of the companies that we think are cool right now didn't even exist back then but uh let's see something like dropbox was there i don't think anyone got a job in dropbox uh in more recent years they've been people who got jobs in dropbox um there were some uh let's see there were folks who wanted to do research and were trying to do a phd were finding it much harder back then recently we've had someone who started out with like basically minimal knowledge of computer science just at mcit didn't even do like a masters in cs and uh they've managed to get a phd offer from ben i think that yeah it's not you know a job but as a success story i'm very proud of the fact that is also something that can happen uh people have gone into airbnb people let's see pinterest is something that's new in terms of like a you know company that people are going into um yeah so newer domains for sure and then um also worth mentioning people who have gone off and tried to you know do startups and things like that so those are i mean obviously that's riskier but that that's also been something that mcid students have been able to do overall i think uh prospects are pretty high you know happy to supply numbers and all that later on yeah for sure we can always link it in descriptions as well peruse the numbers freely absolutely yeah yeah um also just touching on that a bit what about um okay so to rephrase my question like i know there's a lot of people coming into mcit who are looking into combining with what they currently do with computer science right so do you have any like kind of examples or experiences that you could share about people who did that well uh in recent years i think uh well someone you know quite well you know but uh i'll be allowed to say the names i don't know if you want to see anything let's see if i can always always like edit that out yeah you can always feel like yeah like me yeah exactly so certain someone that you and i both know uh came to this program with the desire to basically work on like smart cities and stuff like that and got an internship in that domain uh pretty much as far as i know never really chased after like the big tech companies was pretty convinced that they wanted to marry their like previous skills with the computer science skills and now they're working for a company that uh yeah i mean like i don't even understand the complete you know picture over there but they're very passionate about like how can i have like smart lighting energy efficient stuff all that you know like this whole concept of smart cities which is futuristic and extremely cool and is as far as i know not directly related to you know anything that the big companies are working on i'm sure will try and buy out these companies at some point but uh yeah so there's that story of uh you know like transport as a domain um being used i know some people who have used i would say some mixture of like computer vision and uh sort of like healthcare type of stuff to uh as their like prior domain of expertise or um well i guess they knew medicine beforehand and then while they were at penn they learned more of the machine learning and vision and then they went back and did more along those lines uh definitely lots of people who used finance before and then after mcit went back and started working more on the like quant side of things as opposed to i guess whatever they were doing before they it probably was some kind of consultant before coming to is my assumption um yeah so those are sort of the three examples that come to mind i i'll also say that uh and i don't think that this is a bad thing i said like there are folks who join mcit thinking that they will use their prior skills and then use cs and then like mix and merge and all that and oftentimes i wonder whether that's because they feel that they can't compete in the field because you know their experience will be less than someone who's had a four-year degree or a five-year degree or whatever the case might be and they find hopefully to their amazement pleasant surprise whatever you want to say that they are totally accepted by these bigger companies they can ace the tech interviews and all that and uh if they want to just completely leave their past behind that is definitely possible and i actually think 71 of our candidates are doing that i don't i personally don't view it as a negative and i don't think that they view it as one either i think for a lot of them it's like yeah i didn't know that i could join an amazon google i used to do chemistry now i'm in amazon uh hey is amazon doing chemistry no am i disappointed that i don't have to deal with you know chemistry stuff anymore absolutely not i hated chemistry i just wrote that i'll mix and merge chemistry and cs because i thought that would get me into the program so yeah so i don't think that there's i personally have not heard of anyone being disappointed at least at this stage in their career that they're not merging their previous skill with what they have yeah for sure i can like speak personally to that as well because that's what i wrote on my personal statement like oh i'm gonna mix healthcare with cs but in a way it's because i only knew healthcare right so it's to me like i had to merge it with healthcare because i don't know what is there that is outside of it and then after being exposed to so many more opportunities you realize that maybe it's not healthcare that you love so much maybe it's like specific patterns of thinking right like maybe you just really like the idea of computational thinking or like data science and you can apply that to so many other fields in tech as well yeah i think one thing uh just to build off of your point a lot of people don't know what computer science truly is until they're in the midst of a computer science department and curing the projects and all those i mean companies other than the ones that they might be thinking of when they think of computer science like eventually they might go to those bigger companies but they might be viewing i don't know google as a search engine uh i don't think you know anyone in computer science thinks of google as just a search engine anymore right so once you join cs you realize okay there's so many different courses and so many different application areas and if you're interested in something you just pursue that yeah for sure in the beginning it's like you don't even know what you don't know right so you gotta like yeah you think you know i mean i you think pro lots of people make this mistake of you know thinking that cs equals programming it takes a long time before you realize that thankfully actually for both you and i if i can speak for you also a little bit but it is more than you know like writing a whole bunch of like classes and for loops and recursions and all that type of stuff and i think you know both of us would not be in this field if it was simply that yeah exactly like that's really just the tip of the iceberg there's just so much more to it yeah but thank you so much for that i think that was really insightful because it kind of covered both like you know internships jobs as well as like more specific examples which i feel like um other platforms where i guess like other sources of information they just kind of do the stats right but it doesn't really mean anything unless you really attach it to a story yeah i i'd also say and i mean assuming that we have a broad audience for this i love the fact that there's we have we have lots of stories of people who kind of gave up their yeah i'd say give up their career a little bit while um well basically having to be homemakers and you know like bring up kids and then they were sort of doing computer science and then they brought up their kids then they wanted to come back to computer science and then they through our program they managed to like you know i guess like reignite that passion and then go back into computer science and uh i think that that's been yeah that's been very cool for me to see i really love the fact that um yes computer science is somewhat on the younger side if you look at like average age of employees and things like that but a lot of people do our program figure out that they're just as smart as you know the youngsters are that they can you know go back into the field and because they have more experience that they'll actually be given positions of more responsibility as well yeah for sure that's really cool i didn't even know that but that's really that's a really cool way of using that degree yeah they've been um i'd say every year we've had at least two people who are coming back into the field i uh one of the people actually gave me a book which is in my office that i can't get access to because of covert uh but that book basically talks about i think the title of the book is like what computers can't do and it was written in like the 60s or something like that so it's funny to see you know like that was their association with computer science like before that they're going to give it up you know bring up their kids now their kids are grown they're like okay you know what i gave up so much for you now i'll come back into the field and i don't think that they could have done that with like the regular masters in cs degree right yeah for sure

can we let's talk about where mcit is heading in the future well we just have to am allowed to answer this question by throwing the big villain in the story completely out of the picture or am i supposed to address the villain our current president that is up to you that's after your discretion i guess the short version is that uh under the current situation is for you to predict anything but i will say that we're no worse than any other degree program where um from everything i've seen the world still needs technology you and i are using technology at this very moment as we speak to one another and people from our degree program could be employed by said company that is providing the technology that helps you and i talk uh there are

more than enough venues where people are i mean even outside of zoom like people are trying to stay in touch with other people through this pandemic i think you've seen social media companies try and be better about how they process information how they try to ensure that fake news is spread to a slightly lesser extent than it was before meaning that we need i think more sophisticated folks to be employed by those companies um it's no longer going to be a good enough to just you know like have some full stack developer you want a full stack developer with also some actual understanding of what's going on behind the scenes what content needs to be published what content does not need to be published should be flagged and stuff like that so i guess cs is still going to be around whenever this pandemic is done uh i would say before the pandemic hit i was optimistic about going back to what you were saying of uh you know differences between mcid online and mcit on campus um i was optimistic about the fact that students seemed to be picking one or the other based on the type of student that they were so we were catering to a much broader audience than we ever were when it was only mcid on campus it also meant that the people who came on campus had made more of that conscious decision of well i'm on campus i'm gonna avail of the facilities that are around i'm gonna try to get to know more people try to do cooler courses maybe courses that are not offered and on online um so yeah i think i've been very happy to see and i hope that this will be a continuing trend even in this pandemic where students are doing more diverse things in terms of taking different courses i think there was a time maybe four or five years ago where everyone wanted to do machine learning and databases and maybe something else like you look at the resume sorry the transcripts of mcit students and you'd probably have like two clusters or something like that right whereas these days i feel that there are more things that people are doing people are being a little bit more adventurous again the coronal virus is going to make things going to make people more risk averse i feel for the next couple of semesters but yeah i think we're headed in the right direction i think we're still a unique program i think uh and also i mean while this doesn't directly pertain to folks like yourself you know i think within penn more and more undergraduates are also discovering this program so their people will take you know like an undergrad programming class in their junior year or senior or even and they're looking around trying to scramble around for like a degree program like how do i get into computer science well transitioning from the undergrad to mcid when you're in pen is actually quite easy more and more applicants coming from that route as well yeah cool uh that definitely answered my question pretty well like so mcit is gonna it's still introduced interdisciplinary and computer science is still going to exist and you just see like more and more of like diversity and trends that didn't exist a few years back right yeah i think students are more i mean short answer is that students are being more adventurous no i really hope i mean among lots and lots of things that i can abuse the virus about like i hope it doesn't tamper that adventurous spirit i hope people don't say look there are only like two companies that are ever going to hire we're all gonna dump our resumes there uh because we all sort of like follow in the footsteps of our seniors without realizing that they might have been pretty drastic circumstances at least in this case yeah for sure i hope so too yeah uh okay so i have one last question and then i was thinking we might do a lightning round after that where i just ask you random questions so last question yeah whatever you want yeah admission tips what are you guys looking for i think we addressed this a little bit i think um great for sure uh be genuine we're um yeah i wonder if giving a specific example will be useful

over here yeah it'll be useful for me because i'm sick of that example and i if someone watches this video at least i'll get like a variety right so i'll mention it they're somewhere out there on the interwebs i think that there's an example statement that says something to the effect of i was debugging a program and i was spending a lot of time on it and then suddenly at 3am i was able to figure out the solution and you know when i first transitioned to being the director and was looking at statements uh i was like why does everyone finish their debugging at 3 a. m what what on earth is going on over here right so so that's just an example of like just be genuine like not all of you finished your debugging at 3am the reason you're saying that is because there's some weirdo human machine learning algorithm going on that's saying okay that person wrote that and they got into mcit

so i'm also going to write that no just be genuine we all have fascinating stories to tell uh i mean pretty much every mcit yes of course it's biosampling here for sure these are people who managed to make it to campus if i managed to sit down with them as i did once upon a time with you tina and learned like you know who you are what you did before in your life and all that they're just fascinating stories like why did you want to do computer science you know it is rarely as boring as i wanted money i'm convinced that is that could be a reason yes but there's also like i don't know some other cause over there right like and maybe that causes something personal you felt that um technology can help in healthcare and you saw someone in your family fall sick and you saw that uh technology was not helpful maybe you've lived through this pandemic as we all are and uh well i can tell you like in my experience you know tele medicine is totally horrible like you know like you could be my doctor right now tina and i have to pay you money because telemedicine appointment right so you feel like you can improve the state of telemedicine so uh give us specific examples give us a reason why you're in interested in like making this transition and that that's very important uh and then the last thing i'd say is recommendation letters i think a lot of students make the mistake of not reaching out to people who know them well uh people who can talk about i'm not saying you know like when so-and-so was in kindergarten of course we have a teacher like that for sure reach out to them but if you've done just a one month two month boot camp experience in computer science and you're expecting that teacher to write a very strong recommendation for you uh yeah they might be able to do that but we're interested in knowing more about you so someone who can say you know i don't know their computer science but when they took this course with me they were the only one who ever managed to do this question that question might be i don't know in sociology but going back to that grittiness thing right like here's evidence of grit that's worth a whole lot more than can you write a for loop in a bootcamp i mean we're not asking remember we're not asking you to prove that you can do computer science right now we're just asking you to say that you can take on challenges how you prove that

think about that and i i'd say that that's probably like the first step to succeeding your admission yeah for sure i definitely can see that yeah okay lightning round sure okay yeah i mean the other ones you at least told me what they might be questions but here oh no i told you what the lighting round is going to be oh okay and then well then i didn't prepare okay so i prepared for the other ones it's more like okay at least i knew okay go go go okay no now i can't even be fast i can't read my writing wait are my answers supposed to be one word no no it doesn't have it can be like one sentence two sentences basically just like there's gonna be like fast questions um what's the best thing about being director of mcit the students that one's easy yeah the students the variety of challenges that they pose and the immense amount of satisfaction that i hope they get as well but i definitely get on graduation day which damn you coronavirus you denied me my moment of happiness this spring so my graduation that's why i know your graduation and i don't know when it's going to happen but i really hope you folks come back if you don't come back i'm going to hound every single one of you i will come back thank you okay next um oh my god okay i'm gonna have to edit this video okay i'm sorry i have to i literally can't read my writing so i need to go look at what oh okay i'm sorry about philly why is philly a great city so many reasons uh let's see i i think philly has something in it for everyone is probably the best answer i can give for me i'll tell you why i like philly um it's bikeable it's walkable someone who likes sports i really love that all the sports arenas are like right next to one another it's an experience that you can't have i think in pretty much any other city maybe in the world where you can take a subway ride go watch uh like a phillies game in the afternoon and then an eagles game at night so uh yeah cool um what do you miss the most from pre covered i've already said students i'd say yeah just getting to know your audience really well or at least having the potential to get to know your audience very well i think with zoom or all these like online classes yeah even the best of times even when the students are really participating you just don't get that energy i yeah there have been days when i'm not feeling that great and then i go into the classroom i'm like this is where i get my you know my spirits up this is where i hope students are also excited that they're learning something um yeah those one and a half hours or whatever that i managed to spend with folks in the classroom i don't have not found an equivalent zone yeah for sure i missed that too what's the funniest thing that has happened during your time at mcit oh the most embarrassing oh the funnier well i don't think this was embarrassing this is definitely the funniest um and i think i narrate the story every single time because i think it's yeah i obviously won't mention the person but in algorithms typically when i teach breadth first search i give the example of the bacon number you know like degrees of separation from kevin bacon uh now one student because of my accent because it's bacon because i assume that they weren't paying that much attention heard it as breakfast search and came up to me after the class and actually even not even after the class i think it was after the course was done or something like that and said yeah arvind i always thought it was breakfast search and i only now i know it's breadth first search and uh if you see me struggling it's because yeah i mean in the indian accent that is probably how i pronounce both those words and i can easily see it be you know the same yeah anyway that was those the funniest just because you had to be there and you totally see it like if you and this is also i think a clear indication of like we do not sometimes there's this assumption that oh we're looking for prior knowledge right like this student did not know computer science is was a ta at some point for 594 or data structures class but when they were doing 596 breakfast search breadth first search dinner search they were all the same for them and yeah i will always think of it as yeah it was super funny you have to be a cs person to get that i think it's really funny okay that's it that's the questions i have for you anything you want to say to whoever may be watching this video which i don't know at this point yeah and i don't either uh i don't know yeah right well okay i'll say this and uh i hope you are not embarrassed at all when i say this but uh folks whoever was watching this video like the interaction that tina and i are having right now that's what i love about this program i love like the fact that you know we're at the stage where i hope that the two of us stay in touch and i hope that um you know she can give me anytime i she wants to and i can do likewise and i can follow her cs life uh is something that yeah i'm very happy about i don't think i would be able to do that in a different program uh and yeah this is like me you know tooting my own horn but i'd like to think that students in other programs don't manage to have that association with their teachers either so um yeah so if you like that interaction apply i completely agree though really i don't think i could have had this conversation like you know just our relationship that we have right now like the way in like another program right like i feel like mcit is very special in that sense all right thank you so much for coming today yeah and then i feel like this has been first of all it's been just really enjoyable talking to you because we haven't heard it in a while recording and then because i don't want this to end with like formal stuff so yeah i know this is i need a foreign because i it's very problematic i've had that problem before where i always have that