During his first yr at MIT in 2021, Matthew Caren ’25 received an intriguing email inviting students to use to develop into members of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing’s (SCC) Undergraduate Advisory Group (UAG). He immediately shot off an application.
Caren is a jazz musician who majored in computer science and engineering, and minored in music and theater arts. He was drawn to the faculty due to its concentrate on the applied intersections between computing, engineering, the humanities, and other academic pursuits. Caron eagerly joined the UAG and stayed on all of it 4 years at MIT.
First formed in April 2020, the group brings together a committee of around 25 undergraduate students representing a broad swath of each traditional and blended majors in electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) and other computing-related programs. They advise the faculty’s leadership on issues, offer constructive feedback, and function a sounding board for progressive recent ideas.
“The ethos of the UAG is the ethos of the faculty itself,” Caren explains. “For those who very intentionally bring together a bunch of smart, interesting, fun-to-be-around people who find themselves all thinking about completely diverse things, you may get some really cool discussions and interactions out of it.”
Along the best way, he’s also made “dear” friends and located true colleagues. Within the group’s monthly meetings with SCC Dean Dan Huttenlocher and Deputy Dean Asu Ozdaglar, who can also be the department head of EECS, UAG members speak openly about challenges in the scholar experience and offer recommendations to guests from across the Institute, similar to faculty who’re developing recent courses and searching for student input.
“This group is exclusive within the sense that it’s a direct line of communication to the faculty’s leadership,” says Caren. “They make time of their insanely busy schedules for us to elucidate where the holes are, and what students’ needs are, directly from our experiences.”
“The scholars within the group are keenly thinking about computer science and AI, especially how these fields connect with other disciplines. They’re also captivated with MIT and desperate to enhance the undergraduate experience. Hearing their perspective is refreshing — their honesty and feedback have been incredibly helpful to me as dean,” says Huttenlocher.
“Meeting with the scholars every month is an actual pleasure. The UAG has been a useful space for understanding the scholar experience more deeply. They engage with computing in diverse ways across MIT, so their input on the curriculum and broader college issues has been insightful,” Ozdaglar says.
UAG program manager Ellen Rushman says that “Asu and Dan have done an incredible job cultivating an area wherein students feel secure bringing up things that aren’t positive on a regular basis.” The group’s suggestions are regularly implemented, too.
For instance, in 2021, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the architects designing the brand new SCC constructing, presented their renderings at a UAG meeting to request student feedback. Their original interiors layout offered only a few of the hybrid study and meeting booths which might be so popular in today’s first floor lobby.
Hearing strong UAG opinions concerning the kind of open-plan, community-building spaces that students really valued was considered one of the things that created the change to the present floor plan. “It’s super cool walking into the personalized space and seeing it continuously being in use and at all times crowded. I actually feel comfortable after I can’t get a table,” says Caren, who has just ended his tenure as co-chair of the group in preparation for graduation.
Caren’s co-chair, rising senior Julia Schneider, who’s double-majoring in artificial intelligence and decision-making and arithmetic, joined the UAG as a first-year to grasp more concerning the college’s mission of fostering interdepartmental collaborations.
“Since I’m a student in electrical engineering and computer science, but I conduct research in mechanical engineering on robotics, the faculty’s mission of fostering interdepartmental collaborations and uniting them through computing really spoke to my personal experiences in my first yr at MIT,” Schneider says.
During her time on the UAG, members have joined subgroups focused around achieving different programmatic goals of the faculty, similar to curating a public lecture series for the 2025-26 academic yr to provide MIT students exposure to school who conduct research in other disciplines that relate to computing.
At one meeting, after hearing how difficult it’s for college students to grasp all of the possible courses to take during their tenure, Schneider and a few UAG peers formed a subgroup to search out an answer.
The scholars agreed that a few of the most effective courses they’ve taken at MIT, or pairings of courses that basically struck a chord with their interdisciplinary interests, got here because they spoke to upperclassmen and got recommendations. “This sort of tribal knowledge doesn’t really permeate to all of MIT,” Schneider explains.
For the last six months, Schneider and the subgroup have been working on a course visualization website, NerdXing, which got here out of those discussions.
Guided by Rob Miller, Distinguished Professor of Computer Science in EECS, the subgroup used a dataset of EECS course enrollments over the past decade to develop a distinct style of tool than MIT students typically use, similar to CourseRoad and others.
Miller, who usually attends the UAG meetings in his role because the education officer for the faculty’s cross-cutting initiative, Common Ground for Computing Education, comments, “the really cool idea here is to assist students find paths that were taken by other people who find themselves like them — not only thinking about computer science, but possibly also in biology, or music, or economics, or neuroscience. It is very much within the spirit of the College of Computing — applying data-driven computational methods, in support of scholars with wide-ranging computational interests.”
Opening the NerdXing pilot, which is about to roll out later this spring, Schneider gave a demo. She explains that when you are a pc science (CS) major and would really like to create a visible presenting potential courses for you, after you choose your major and a category of interest, you’ll be able to expand an enormous graph presenting all of the possible courses your CS peers have taken over the past decade.
She clicked on class 18.404 (Theory of Computation) because the starting class of interest, which led to class 6.7900 (Machine Learning), after which unexpectedly to 21M.302 (Harmony and Counterpoint II), a sophisticated music class.
“You begin to see aggregate statistics that let you know what number of students took each course, and you’ll be able to further pare it all the way down to see the most well-liked courses in CS or follow lines of red dots between courses to see the standard sequence of classes taken.”
By getting granular on the graph, users begin to see classes that they’ve probably never heard anyone talking about of their program. “I feel that considered one of the explanations you come to MIT is to have the option to take cool stuff exactly like this,” says Schneider.
The tool goals to indicate students how they will select classes that go far beyond just filling degree requirements. It’s only one example of how UAG is empowering students to strengthen the faculty and the experiences it offers them.
“We’re MIT students. We have now the abilities to construct solutions,” Schneider says. “This group of individuals not only brings up ways wherein things could possibly be higher, but we take it into our own hands to make things better.”
