Building a Better Tech School

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/14/education/edlife/cornell-nyc-tech-planned-for-roosevelt-island-starts-up-in-chelsea.html?hp

by wallflower • 13 years ago

34 16 13 years ago

nytimes.com

elvinj• 13 years ago

I have to give a big kudos to Ted Krum on page 3 - going back to school 20+ years after you graduated to re-learn computer science with kids half your age is really a beautiful story. I wish him the best of luck and I really hope he finds a good job in his old/new profession.

prezjordan• 13 years ago

I'm going to look across the Hudson in awe. Well, technically, I can't see Roosevelt island but you get the idea. I hope they do some awesome meetups there

ruswick• 13 years ago

I don't get it. This is a small accomplishment the benefits of which likely won't extend beyond a small subset of an already incomprehensibly minuscule portion of business and CS students. This sort of program might be great for Cornell students, but is unlikely to have an impact on education in general. Cornell (as with all Ivies) is in a fundamentally privileged position because it has the clout to court city officials and the endowment to expend billions on land and building costs to open a campus in the heart of NYC. This sort of projects is absolutely untenable for the universities that serve the other 95% percent of aspiring technologists and entrepreneurs. It's a novel idea and I wish them well, but I simply can't get excited about a development that is almost exclusively limited to the elite.

gtani• 13 years ago

http://tech.cornell.edu/program/

http://www.cornell.edu/nyc/

Not a lot of info on curriculum, this seems similar to Zipfian Academy discussed a few days ago, or a certificate program in Data Science at the Univ. of Washington, but you get a Masters

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5508261

http://www.pce.uw.edu/certificates/data-science.html

Jormundir• 13 years ago

Who hasn't wanted this type of education? This new campus isn't driven by radical new ideas, it's being driven by what students and businesses have been crying out for for a long time; a practical, hands-on education with the bullshit cut out. The story makes me really sad because it's Cornell doing it with a class of 8 people. The chances this "ground-breaking" "innovative" program will be open to or have any effect on me? 0. But queue the hype-machine, lets drown Cornell in good press and praise.

I will be rooting for the online education platforms to provide this level of education.

thrush2• 13 years ago

Why wouldn't this have a positive effect on you?

For one, if you are in New York or the Tri-State area, then a new (hopefully prestigious) tech school should at the very least pull more attention and business to this area, and hopefully educate future engineers that will fill empty spots in industry. It's true there are only 8 students this semester, but they don't even have a campus yet! According to Cornell's timeline, students will be moving to Roosevelt Island in 2017, at which point I'd imagine there will be at least a few hundred.

cite: http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/2013/01/cornell-tech-wel...

Second, if Cornell Tech succeeds, it would help provide direction to other states and universities who would like to do something similar. As an article in the nytimes stated previously:

"Colleges and universities across the country — a great many of which are scrambling to find new ways to finance scientific research, as well as new ways to profit from the fruits of that research — are watching closely. In the last year, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has announced the creation of technology schools by both Columbia and New York University. And Cornell’s president, David J. Skorton, said he had been visited by representatives from other cities hopeful that the Cornell NYC Tech model might work there, too."

cite: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/22/nyregion/cornell-nyc-tech-...

I hope that online education prospers so that more people can learn what they need with less barriers (low supply, travel, cost), but I think that's mutually exclusive to what Cornell is doing.

I think we need to ask a question for college students: Where does Cornell Tech find itself among the list of prestigious CS Masters Programs?

I also think we (the hacker news community, and engineers in general) need to pool together and see what we want Cornell Tech to turn into. It's a very rare time that we get to see a University in its early stages, and given that it seems Cornell Tech cares heavily about technology, they may listen to what we have to say.

fudged712• 13 years ago

I'm frustrated by courses that provide a small set of tech projects to work on which have no real purpose or audience, leading to disposable effort. I'm frustrated by fantastic teachers educating students in topics that the teacher has very little interest in.

I'd love to see more schools embrace informal interdisciplinary collaborative opportunities to build projects that aren't disposable but have a real purpose. I've been working with my local startup community to integrate further with my university to provide practical projects for courses, mentorship for those who need it, integration with the local industry, and speakers to inspire them. I think it will provide students with more engagement in the learning process, and teachers with the opportunity to discuss the issues that they're very much interested in.

Learning by doing, but having a purpose for doing. Maybe there would be investor interest when they're finished, but regardless the goal would be to build something that people are actually going to use. Using and teaching the latest technologies, and relating it to the curriculum which is often based on fundamental concepts.

jjoonathan• 13 years ago

There is a supply/demand problem in this approach: finding a unique project for every student or group of students that

A) Uses the libraries or techniques the students need to learn about

B) Hasn't already been done or requires meaningful improvement

C) Doesn't need to be done with stiff reliability or time constraints

D) Doesn't involve an excessive proportion of uneducational grunt-work

is an incredibly difficult challenge, and solutions simply won't scale. Besides, there is moral hazard involved: you don't want the system to devolve into a free labor source, yet the incentives for those in charge are aligned to encourage development in that direction. You go to school to learn techniques that are difficult to learn on the job and that you are unlikely to learn on the job, goals which are subverted by having students work in what begins to look more and more like an unpaid (or negatively paid) intership.

fudged712• 13 years ago

We already have the option to work on 'entrepreneurial projects' for our capstone (final year) projects--in contrast with industry-sponsored projects--but the resources and entrepreneurial mentorships aren't provided.

For the smaller project courses, I just want to see the option of getting marks for contributing to a fun/useful real project. The rest of the list could stay the same if the professor chooses. There would never be a lack of projects.

Our capstone project is already an unpaid project. The industry sponsors just pay for the materials you need. You do work for the company for marks, and you hand over all rights to your work. Nobody has a problem with it. It's practical experience, and it's a requirement for your degree.

jclos• 13 years ago

"In fact, no professor has an office, not even the dean, and Dr. Huttenlocher insists they will not when the campus moves to Roosevelt Island, either. Instead, each person has a desk with low dividers, and people can grab conference rooms as needed — much like the headquarters of a small tech company."

This sounds a lot like what we currently have in my university and it is hell. Right now it's only for PhD students but next year junior staff will share our pain. Communicating is all good and everything, but academic/research work also require quietness. In fact, I would even argue that it requires quietness more often than it requires communication, which is why all these "communication-first" offices drive me insane.

Or am I the one that is wrong, and everybody else is able to "focus" the noise out of their head?

rdouble• 13 years ago

In every tech company with open plan offices, the engineers all work late into the night while wearing giant headphones.

aswanson• 13 years ago

It's not just you, it's common sense for anyone who has developed anything new. Im extremely sensitive to verbal distraction. I have no idea where these geniuses came to the conclusion that replication of the social properties of a train station or walmart somehow facilitates better outcomes. I guess it's because the people calling the shots are removed from in-depth thinking and spend most of their day running their mouth or being bored and wanting to run their mouth.

rayiner• 13 years ago

This is the height of cargo cult behavior.

davidf18• 13 years ago

I live in Manhattan in NYC and there are several things wrong with this school.

A huge draw to NYC for really smart people that this school wishes to draw is living and working in Manhattan, esp. the southern part (near Greenwich Village) where NYU is located also not far from Silicon Alley (Union Square) or Google (Chelsea). This part of the city is very multi-cultural and fun to live in and "very high value" for making contacts in the words of Richard Florida. Instead, they are going to put the school outside of Manhattan on a separate island (boring, boring, boring).

Second, Technion, the partner school has a very, very low tuition(e.g. a few thousand dollars equiv). This school will be charging $45K per year or so. Even in the US some of the best engineering schools (e.g. U. Illinois/Urbana) is less than $20K in state. By charging such a high tuition, the school will be selecting for high wealth families that can afford a $250K education. Instead, they should be charging tuitions along the lines of City University of New York (CUNY).

thrush2• 13 years ago

MIT - $42,050 - http://web.mit.edu/facts/tuition.html

Cal Tech - $38,084 - http://www.gradoffice.caltech.edu/documents/124-2012-13_esti...

CMU - $40,000 -http://www.cmu.edu/hub/tuition/graduate/index.html

Plus this is only a 1 year program, so the $250k tuition doesn't really apply.

jessriedel• 13 years ago

Roosevelt Island is essentially Columbia in terms of accessibility to lower Manhattan.

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