Behold…the future!
Posted on May 10, 2003
Okay, it’s a lame title, but what do you expect from and E/N page?
Next week I start taking I’m starting back to school. Since I work for IU, they have a cool benefit known as Fee Courtesy where they pay 100% of 3 cedits and 50% of the next 3 credits per semester. I’m going to be taking Beginning Japanese I. I took a class in Russian years ago and got a B in it while hardly studying, and besides, I’m thinking that learning Japanese will look good on a resume (particularly if I do well and stick with it). This class is 5 credits, so that takes up most of my Fee Courtesy for the Summer session. Right now I’m considered as a “Graduate Non-Degree” student, which means I have a bachelor’s degree, but I’m not enrolled in any post graduate program. This mainly means I am taking classes for “personal enrichment” and/or rounding out my bachelor’s degree.
Signing up for and taking classes has at least got me considering going for a master’s degree. IUPUI does have some good programs, too. The Kelley School of Business at IU is supposed to be one of the top 25 B-schools in the nation. However, right now (which means it could change in the future), I’m leaning towards the School of Informatics at IU. Informatics is sort of a multi-disciplinary school, with many of the faculty holding an appointment in the School of Informatics, and holding another one within another school, like Nursing, Engineering, etc. Of course, being a geek, the fact that they are building a new facility that will be connected to Abilene/Internet 2 is a big plus :-)
At the School of Informatics, I have been mainly looking at Human Computer Interaction and Bioinformatics. Of course, today I read this over at O’Reilly, which gave me some food for thought regarding Bioinformatics. It wasn’t too discouraging, but it did make me wonder whether bioinformatics is biologists with CS/IT skills or CS/IT types with biology skills.
HCI is interesting because it can (in theory) make use of my BS degree in Apparel Design. The advances in electronics are pretty interesting. There are ultrathin LCD displays that can be rolled up, and in the future, they may be able to be sewn into clothing and withstand laundering. The military is doing a lot of advanced research into pervasive technology and “smart clothing.” Not to limit myself, HCI can (again, in theory) also encompass artificial intelligence, robotics, speech and speech recognition, and so on. Apparently, the study of how people interact with technology is a Big Thing [TM]. However, on the less exciting level, HCI also encompasses web page and software interface design. I wouldn’t want to get a master’s degree if all I ended up doing was something that basic.
Bioinformatics (or even some of the other sub-disciplines like Chemical Informatics or Laboratory Informatics) is (or at least appears to be) a specialized form of information technology (IT). This major could pose a few problems for me though. First of all, most of the stuff I know about computers is stuff I taught myself. I’ve had a class in COBOL, a class in Paradox (DB software), and a general “Computers for Dummies” type class that most schools require of undergrads, but this might fall short of what the program requires. I don’t know C, C++, Java, or Perl. I do okay with HTML and MySQL. I can even handle PHP (with a PHP book within grabbing distance) and CSS (despite how my website looks :-) The other potential problem is the last time I had anything to do with biology in a classroom was in 5th grade, 25 or so years ago (damn, I feel old all of a sudden). In high school and at various colleges, I’ve never had any biology courses. I’ve had plenty of earth science courses, and even a few chemistry courses, but that’s about the extent of it (no physics courses, either). In the Fall, I will probably try to remedy this by taking an introductory biology course.It would be kind of pointless to try for a degree in Bioinformatiics, if I didn’t have any aptitude for biology. We’ll see.
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