Earlier this month, SSN School of Advanced Software Engineering in association with Carnegie Mellon University came together to offer a course in Software architecture for working professionals on a part-time basis. Speaking about the course Matthew Bass said, “Students will take two courses per semester. There will be three semesters a year and the course will be for two years.”
For the past 12 years, SSN School of Advanced Software engineering and Carnegie Mellon University have been offering one-and-half year MS-IT courses, in which the student spends the first year in Chennai. After completing the course in India, the student moves to Carnegie Mellon University for two semesters to complete the course.
Carnegie Mellon University is one of the leading universities in the U.S. especially in software engineering and some advanced courses. Matthew Bass, faculty of Institute for Software Research at Carnegie Mellon, elaborated on the special features of the university and the various courses.
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He said, “Our Masters in Software Engineering is the most successful and longest running course. It was the first of its kind and like other engineering disciplines, this course too requires practice and apprenticeship to produce effective engineers.”
“We follow a ‘learn by doing’ approach. In this the students get to work on real life projects sponsored by big companies like Google, Nasa, Jet propulsion labs and Cisco, to name a few. It takes anything between 1,500 to 5,000 engineering hours and is part of the education which we pioneered.”
Apart from the Masters in Software Engineering and Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon also offers some advanced courses like Robotic, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Bass spoke about the salient features of some the courses and said, “We concentrate on applied focus and cross-disciplinary approach. To give an example, an Industrial design student, a Computer Science and an Electrical Computer engineering students are put in a team and they will have to develop a product that may be a prototype or one off- product for a company. There will be no lectures. The product also can commercialise later and the students stand to benefit from their learning.”
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With top companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Yahoo coming for recruitment, Carnegie Melon offers a great prospect for students. To be eligible for a course in the university in addition to a successful academic profile, the student needs to have a minimum score of 100 in the TOEFL.
Bass also gave some tips for students pursuing engineering to make them job-ready.
He said, “It's important to understand the relationship between technical activities and strategic activities in organisations. One has to be well-versed in concepts and language that go beyond engineering activities. People who know only about engineering activities are going to be less useful than people who can connect engineering with the strategic activities.”