I’m in the 3rd semester of the 2 year graduate program in Information Management and Systems at UC Berkeley’s most excellent School of Information, popularly known as the I School. The I School is notoriously hard to define since it is highly cross-disciplinary and brings together students from backgrounds as diverse as Architecture, Cognitive Science, Literature, Philosophy and Ocean Engineering to name just a few. Regardless, the common theme of interest at the school is information at the interface of technology, society, law and policy, industry, culture, media and art. I present here a list of courses I have taken so far. As the list shows, the breadth of topics one can study in this program is truly impressive. In one sense this list appears to be lacking depth, providing only a sample of fundamentals in Computer Science, Management and Product Design. However, in hindsight, exploring and experimenting with a variety of topics has taught me a great deal about how and why information works and will shape our future. For someone torn between the choice of going to a B School or studying more Engineering, this school is the best of both worlds.
Summer 2010
INFO 153, Web Architecture
ART N160, Fundamentals of Digital Photography
Fall 2010
INFO 202, Information Organization and Retrieval
INFO 206, Distributed Computing Applications and Infrastructure
INFO 225, Managing in Information-Intensive Companies
INFO 290, Information Organization Lab
CS 298, HCI Design Clinic
Spring 2011
INFO 203, Social and Organizational Issues of Information
INFO 205, Information Law & Policy
INFO 231, Economics of Information
CS 188, Artificial Intelligence
Summer 2011
INFO 297, Summer Internship at Tubemogul
Fall 2011
INFO C262, Tangible User Interfaces
INFO 290, Social Computing
CS 294, Software Engineering for Scientific Computing
ME 290P, Managing the New Product Development Process: Design Theory and Methodology
A screenshot of a blind Pacman hunting ghosts using a particle filter, from one of my favorite homework assignments.
