12 Months of HCI

Yesterday, just when I was starting to feel more stabled and settled into Pittsburgh and the HCI program, a little bit more chaos entered into my day.  I went to the first class for my highly anticipated “Evaluation of Computational Cognitive Architectures”class (what an impressive sounding name!).  Right after I sat down I found out from a classmate that it wasn’t really a class and even though it had already been approved by my adviser I couldn’t get credit for it.  I wanted to take some classes in Cognitive Modeling and this seemed like my best (and only) option to do so this semester.  I knew that it was going to be a seminar style class.  I assumed that we would have readings every week that we would discuss in class and then do a significant paper or something at the end.  This is how a previous seminar class in undergrad was structured.  It turns out its really more of a series of presentations by various speakers.  You can ask them questions as they go, but its not really a group and discussion.  And its definitely geared towards professors and PhD students.  And most importantly there is no work to do.  Thus, my previous approval for this elective was revoked and a mad scramble to find a replacement is underway….

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I’ve just finished my first day of classes at CMU and so far so good.  During the orientation the previous HCI graduate students said that on the first day of the HCI Methods class last year the professor told everyone that they were already a week behind in their reading.  Thankfully that didn’t happen today. In fact we have no homework (yet).  The class still looks like alot of work, but hopefully it won’t be as insane as it was made out to be.

My biggest issues have been with the non-CMU parts of Pittsburgh: Verizon screwing up my internet connection, my landlord loosing track of payments I sent them (twice),  Pennsylvania alcohol laws that seemed designed to make the purchase of alcohol an all around unpleasant experience.  But the CMU parts are all good.  My fellow MHCI students are smart, friendly, and diverse.  The classes look interesting and useful.  The trickiest part of the semester looks to be the logistics of scheduling meetings and work for the various group simultaneous group projects.