Summer at MIT

Although a few classes are being held throughout the summer, campus is generally really quite. For the SDM program in particular there are four classes being held between now and the Spring semester. I'm currently only taking two classes; one, Systems Engineering, has already begun, the other, Financial and Managerial Accounting, starts next month.

Systems Engineering, in a sentence, as far as I can tell, is the formal study of modularity. Although these concepts are well-suited at very large corporations and governmental bureaucracies (where projects typically span long time-horizons), given that this is MIT, my challenge is to determine how to extrapolate this material to augment my thesis. While I've been familiar with modularity from my software design background, the formal world of Systems Engineering is far more vast and the hope is I can incorporate lessons learned into my group at work. Given that my group provides operational efficiencies in an IP Engineering environment at a Tier-1 network service provider, and while we do write re-use, I think this class will provide formal methods that'll allow us to abstract the categorization of our code base. That's the hope anyway. :)

Financial and Managerial Accounting, I'm told, allows one to make sense of a company's financial statement. Having listened to my company's CEO "make sense" of quarterly results for the past seven years, I'm really looking forward to being able to make sense of my CEO's "sense" by the end of the semester.