Why I love my TUI class

I took Tangible User Interfaces because it fit with my schedule, but I expected very little of it - and I could not have been more mistaken! It is more inspiring than the best art classes I've taken. I find myself looking at objects in my house and thinking about how and why one might attach sensors, motors, music, and lights - really changing how one interacts with the world and the information available in the environment. My research focus (information architecture) hasn't changed, but my understanding and respect for designers has increased dramatically, and the way I look at computation has been transformed.

Of course, I have to finish my other homework (calculating system downtime, defending project management decisions) before I get to go back to building my rocket/potty-training robot for TUI...

Career Fairs @iSchool

After iSchool, what? Being well into the second half of the first semester, it was a good time to start thinking about it - full time positions for second years and summer internship positions for the first year students. Apart from the career fairs that happen at Berkeley level, iSchool organizes fairs and information sessions targeted specifically for iSchool grads.
This fall, it started with an information session by the Accenture Technology Labs last month. There was another one by Google organized on 30^th October where three cool folks from Google took us through the product lifecycle of the Google Checkout product.
On 7^th November we had our iSchool Career fair. About fifteen companies participated looking to recruit in a range of expertise including the user experience domain, information architecture and the product management area. It was nice to see so many iSchool and Berkeley alumni coming back to get more of their kind into their companies. Ranging from large corporations to startups, the diversity that we are especially known for, was prevalent even at the fair! Companies like Microsoft, Adaptive Path, Salesforce, Wells Fargo, Zazzle, Sapient, TIBCO and many others took the stage.
Thanks to Shirley and Meg for an excellent organization. Looking forward to having another one over in the Spring semester!

Halloween Festivities

These last few weeks were very busy at the iSchool with midterms upon us, but we still managed to sneak in some Halloween fun!

The week before Halloween, everyone was invited to the crypt formerly known as South Hall to enhance their costumes at the Monster Ball Clinic. One of my classmates from Tangible User Interfaces used a white cardboard box to make a scary monster head with razor jaws that she programmed to light up and roar. Costume Clinicians made antennae and other fun costume accents out of LEDs.

The festivities continued on Tuesday when the Master's students and faculty gathered outside of South Hall with carving knives and seed shovels to beautify some pumpkins. The typical iSchool charm was found among them all: the XML pumpkin (with the < > brackets, carved by the XML Foundations professor, Erik Wilde), the iSchool logo pumpkin (with the i man), an artistic pumpkin, and a few angry/evil looking ones. They were on display for all to see until All Hallow's Eve when we took them inside for safe keeping.

We can't forget about the day itself! My only class on Wed. is Information Organization and Retrieval, a class required of all Master's Students. I got together with some fellow first-years and decided to dress up as an infamous concept often referred to during our study of IO: the Document Type Spectrum. The idea is to think of document types as points on a spectrum with presentation, content, and structure rules determining where the document falls. It's one of those things where if you took the class, you would get why it's so nerdy...I mean funny. ;-)

Gotta love the iSchool. =)

*Thanks to Ken-ichi for the Monster Ball photo*