Quest for Graduation: Wages of War

Sorry for abandoning you last week; Clinic suddenly crunched on me. For those of you who haven't run across it yet, Clinic is a really neat program available to most Mudd students. In 1963, Professor Jack Alford of the Engineering Department founded the Engineering Clinic program, grown from the idea that engineers should have the same sort of "clinical" experience that medical students get.

The basic idea is that real-world companies with real-world problems submit a problem that they would like a team of students to work on. If their problem is accepted, a team of 3-5 students in the relevant major gets put together and spends a year working on the project. Clinic is worth 3 units (one normal class) per semester and most students in the majors that offer clinic take 2 semesters -- engineers, masochistic people that they are, take 3.

My Clinic sponsor is Fair Isaac Corporation, of FICO Credit Score fame. They realized that they often have people working in different offices on very similar projects who don't know about one another. This leads to duplication of work, lost efficiency, etc., etc.

The solution? I'm glad you asked. They want us to build them a system that reads their employee's e-mail, determines who is interested in what, and then tells you who else would be interested in receiving any new e-mail you write. It sounds really big-brotherish and scary, but it's contained on the company network and everyhting done on company computers is the property of the company (it's part of the hiring paperwork) so the moral issues are avoided.

It's actually quite a neat project and I have a great team. We were the first team to present our proposed design to the other clinic teams, and while it's great to have that out of the way, it meant we had to prepare the presentation last weekend. That meant we didn't have that time to prepare our Statement of Work, the rough draft of which is due to our faculty advisor on Friday. I was up until 04:40 last night.

Now that I've given you all my excuse I have a request to make of you. Humor my vanity. I know you're out there; the mudderblogs all have Google Analytics tracking our traffic, but I've gotten only one or two comments from prospective students since I started.

I read an interesting article last year; someone did a research project at a university to study the effect of surveilance on people. Students could opt-in to the program and they would then wear tracking devices that would constantly relay their position to a system on the school's computer network. the information was available to everyone at the school. The people who opted into the program could check up on who was checking up on their locations (I'm watching you watch me! You'd better watch yourself!), and astonishingly they started showing signs of depression if noone was looking at the information.

You might think this is shocking at first, but after thinking about it, it sort of makes sense. After all -- that scenario is an actor's worst nightmare; it's the reason most people get stagefright. It's horribly crushing to put yourself on a stage and have nobody interested.

Don't take this to mean I'm upset or depressed by writing this blog -- I'm actually having a great deal of fun doing so -- it's just that I'm writing to help prospective students decide if they want to come to Mudd and I don't feel like I'm having any effect if noone mentions anything. Even if you don't have any questions, drop me a line; say hello. You don't need to sign in to leave a comment, so go ahead and let us know you're there.  We're all excited to hear from you and I just wanted to reiterate that you are, in fact, allowed (and encouraged) to be commenting; asking questions, arguing, and generally being social.

As a parting word, the 10 points I offered for citing the inspiration for the recent post titles is still up for grabs.  You, yes you, should post a comment suggesting where they are coming from.  These 10 points are quite valuable and useful to cash in for instant cred in any geek-trivia competition.

I'll try to get you another update this weekend.

~KMarsh