 With some information, try to fill in a few things that might not be immediately obvious on our website, but you can always turn to the website and follow up and find even more specific things about when your application is due, details about the GRE. Shannon, our terrific administrative system, pointed out to me that there is one typo on your handout that is really very important. And that is that you must take the GRE by December 15 in order for us to get scores by December 31st, so that your application can be complete. So that's very, very important. And if you haven't, if you're planning to apply and you haven't already signed up for the GREs, please, please go ahead and do that. You know, you go to the GRE site, you put in your zip code and it tells you the closest thing and sometimes you have to play around a little bit. I just put in the zip code for Cambridge yesterday just to see the nearest testing facility with availability on December 15th was in Connecticut. Oh boy, I have everyone's on top of this. But I will add not to totally panic you that this is probably the area in the country where the most people in the U.S. take the GREs because it's a brain trust, it's Cambridge and Boston and so many universities. So don't panic if you come from far away, but do go ahead and schedule that test if you've not done so already. I am Heather Anderson. I am the Director of Graduate Studies for Comparative Media Studies. Hello, this is Kurt Pett, full of appropriate to sit there or pull up a chair. We can have people coming in and out a lot. My kids are really busy with this. So hopefully you can convey that sense of excitement. Someone's in, someone's out. He was in between meetings to come by and say hi and introduce themselves. Jane Wang and there's one of our professors who will introduce herself a little bit later. We've got lab manager. We've got three students. So we've got a mix of people that will change throughout the next two hours. I mentioned Shannon already, our administrative assistant who is a source of all knowledge. Anything you can't figure out by asking you're looking for whatever Shannon can tell you. So I'm going to initially do something that I tell people never to do in PowerPoint presentations, which is to say some of the things that are written right up behind me. So bear with me. I'm going to give you a kind of brief overview of what Comparative Media Studies is. We like to think that we address the challenges brought about by ongoing and fundamental changes in the technologies and practices of media production, distribution and consumption. And rather than looking at media specific silos, we're trying to look at the dynamics of media change in a comparative historical and multidisciplinary way across mediums. So if you've been looking at other kinds of graduate programs over the country, you may have seen programs in film studies or film and media studies or screen studies, which people thought was a really great solution to the coming of new media a few years ago. They're like, well, we used to just look at TV, but now we look at film and computer screens and handheld screens and this will sort of cover everything. It's not a bad idea except for audio, radio, different kinds of interfaces that are about media but aren't screen specific. So with Comparative Media Studies, we tried to come up with a rubric that was more inclusive, more multidisciplinary or transdisciplinary. Some people are a little confused. They go to the website and they're like, CMS, what is this W? What's going on? So I'll just explain that CMSW is a composite program. We had a merger in 2012 between Comparative Media Studies and Writing Humanistic Studies. So what we have is two graduate programs and two undergraduate programs. The graduate program on the W side is a science writing program and then we have the Comparative Media Studies side. And both of those graduate programs are masters of science degrees. And then the undergrad degrees are separate things. And as a graduate student, you wouldn't necessarily interact with the undergrads, but it's neat to know that we have a pretty strong undergraduate program. We have among the highest numbers of majors in the humanities at MIT. People don't tend to come to MIT to study literature or sociology. They come here to learn engineering, but the undergrads are required to take eight humanities classes a year to a year, which is a lot for a technically oriented school. And they come to see the value of humanities in a technically oriented academic environment. And this makes us a really good place to be because we consider ourselves as sort of doing applied humanities. And we are humanities that make sense in the context of a technologically oriented institute. So we're based in Shass, School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences. MIT overall was recently ranked one of the three best universities after Harvard and Stanford in the world for Arts and Humanities Education by Time Tire Education, which is a leading British education magazine. And then we were ranked number one in the social sciences. So we're doing pretty well outside of just the things you would think of immediately like engineering and design and space travel and so on. The Comparative Media Set program has graduated over 100 students at this point. Andrew, do you know the exact number? Oh geez, it's about 150 or 160. 150 or 160, okay, another source of information for our communications director. I would say about 30% of those master's students pursue doctoral degrees. We try to take about 10 a year. It depends upon funding because we really like to fund everyone that we bring in. We want to cover your tuition. We want to provide you a research assistantship that will cover your cost of living expenses and so on. And we're very committed to making that happen. So if we have 10 we want, but we can only fund eight or nine, then that is what we bring in. I feel that's the right thing to do. So if we have a class of 10, typically about three people would pursue a PhD program from us. And the other 70% will go into a variety of professional endeavors such as game design, TV production, management, museum education, not-for-profit work, advertising, marketing, really a wide range of areas. And if, hopefully, you're all aware that we have an alumni session tonight from 5 to 6.30. Shannon, what's that room? It's 114. 56. 56. Creighton. 114. It's actually a little easier to find than this one. And we will have four CMS alum there. Two who are, graduate a while ago, one from, I believe, 04. And maybe everyone in 05 or 06 around there, and two who graduated just a few years ago. So, and this is part of our colloquium series. I'll talk more about colloquium later, but it would give you a chance to get a sense of what CMS alums do, what they're up to. And also ask them questions and that kind of thing. We currently receive about 100 applications a year. And as I said, we admit somewhere between eight and 10. I told you it's a fully funded program to the best of our ability. Mostly via these research lab sponsorships. And the program, I'll walk you through the course requirement and so on. But basically, you take a range of courses for your first year and a half and you're spending your last semester, although it is starting before then, your preliminary research and so on. But you spend the end of the program, you're culminating the program with the creation of a master's thesis, which is a written work of 70 to 100 or so pages. Sometimes it has a strong digital component, an online component. We've had a student, for example, who has written a thesis but also produced a documentary to go along with that thesis, or at least a rough cut. So sometimes these projects get very ambitious. I've had people come to my office and say, well, I want to write a thesis, but also do a website and film and look with that. But let's focus on the thesis to start with. So you have to be careful not to bite off more than you can chew. And students will get experience through the program, not only doing this kind of individual work, which is what a thesis is, but also through various kinds of teamwork, whether that means working together in your lab, working on publications together, giving group presentations, and some of the things that our three representative students could probably talk about a little bit in more detail in a few minutes. Here we go. So here are the four big trans elements of the various studies. We are trans-media, we are trans-historical, we are trans-cultural, and we are trans-disciplinary. Here are photos of, which I'm not sure what you can see, but of all of our faculty. So we've got Nivek Bald, who works on documentary production and also has this very interesting platform that he's developed for Indian immigrant communities to share their histories. It's basically a kind of place where people find photographs of their families and put them up and then people can say, oh, I knew that guy. I worked with him in Brooklyn in 1952. And so he's building history in this kind of very managed crowdsource kind of way among his own subjects of his history. Federico Casaleño is a professor of the practice who runs the Mobile Experience Lab, which I am told is soon to be rebranded as Design Lab. Ian Connery is an anthropologist who works on anime in Japan and on pop music, Japanese pop music, and the economics of the global music industry. Sasha Konstantichov works on civic media issues. He's written a book on trans-media activism and immigrant communities in the Los Angeles area. He works on a number of social justice issues. Roxarelle runs the Imagination, Computation, and Expression Laboratory. And so he's interested in cognition issues and experimental computational production that is organized around intersectionality and identity issues. Heather Niddishat, that's me. I work on conservative and right wing media culture. One of my most recent books was on William F. Buckley, who tried to get all the crazy, weird people out of the conservative movement and forge a more legitimate image for that movement. He briefly succeeded, but they come back like weeds. Eric Klopper works on STEM and educational games and runs the name of the lab. Does he run at Arcade right now? Yes, at Arcade. Nick Monford does computational poetry. Really, really interesting stuff and just a perfect example of the sort of merger of humanities, interest, and technology interested in MIT, because he's often working on ways that computers themselves can generate poetry. Not just computers, he uses his brain, too. For example, he's been working for a long time on a book that would be composed of nothing but three-letter words called... Oh, yeah, it's a great three-letter word. I was once trapped in a car trip with him and he just named three-letter words. Very crazy stuff. Lisa Parks works on international issues around technology and surveillance and military technology. She's got a new book out called Life in the Age of Drones. She's been working on very interesting cell phone apps for use in Turkey and other countries where there's quite a bit of censorship and helping people to use their cell phones when they're worried about surveillance, and they want to talk about things that aren't illegal, like birth control issues or getting lesbian rights issues and so on. She's been working in a team to develop apps that would help people in sensitive situations. Jim Perry works on surveillance and history of science. It's our head who will be stopping by later after a meeting. Do you know what time that meeting is? It depends on what's on the agenda. He's got a big administrative meeting, so he will stop by, but he is a rhetorician who also works on contemporary media issues. He's done quite a bit of work on Michael Moore's films and also worked on transgender identity in media and some work on Transparent, I believe. Justin Reich runs the Skeller Teacher Education Program. Okay, wait, but you guys work with Seth, right? Yeah. Okay, and the teacher system's left. Taylor Taylor is a sociologist who focuses on eSports. William Oricchio does so many things, historical work, contemporary work, and there is a futuristic work. He runs the Open Documentary Lab and is known particularly for his research on virtual reality. And finally, Jing Wang, who works on, who has an NGO called, NGO, what? NGO 2.0 in China and works on media and advertising in China. She can fill you in on what she does in just a moment after I finish going through all these slides. So that gives you a sense of our rage and the interdisciplinarity of it. We have people who train in very conventional humanities fields. I myself was an undergraduate, double major in French and film studies, and I went to grad school to study feminist film theory. And then I became self-taught as a TV study scholar. And then I wrote a book about radio. So we come from an interesting range of backgrounds. As I mentioned, we have these research groups that help us sort of put our theory, our critical ideas into practice. They also provide funding opportunities for our students. So the Center for Civic Media, the Education Arcade, the Game Lab, the Mobile Experience Lab, the Imagination Computation Expression Lab, Hyper Studio, Global Media Technologies and Cultures Lab, that's the Leesa Park's new lab, that's our newest one, I believe. Teaching Systems Lab, also new, ish. Open Documentary Lab that I just mentioned. And the Trope Tech, which isn't even on sports. And graph, what? Graph. And graph. Writing, rhetoric and professional communication. Okay. And I'll just mention that if you are here and you are funded through a research lab, that would entail about 20 hours a week of work. And we do our best to rely on your interest with your lab. But that doesn't always work out. We try. I've already mentioned who directs what labs. So I won't belabor this too much. But some of them have a professor who is doing the lead as research director. And some of them have research directors like Open Dot Lab and Sarah Walton and so on. So you can look at all that on our website. Another part of our program is that we have visiting scholars and postdocs. So for example, Tennessee Coates was here for two years as the Martin Luther King visiting scholar teaching kind of more on the W side about memoir and long form writing memoir. So we usually have about 10 visitors in residence, ranging from a semester to a year or two. The middle postdocs are often here for two years. And it adds kind of fresh blood kind of constantly coming into the program. And some of these people also teach courses. And they're also just here as a resource. You know, we don't, Jim parody, for example, teaches a comics class, but comics has been slow to develop as part of our curriculum. But since we had Theresa Rojas, if you're just in comics, you could search her out to talk about comics issues. So the visiting scholars help sort of bring in new ideas and new stuff to what we're doing. This is, this material is all on the website again. So I'll try to, can you guys actually see this? Yes, good. Okay. So run through the curriculum for you. In the first year, you take media theories and methods one, what a terrific howl. Followed by media theories and methods two in the spring. So in the first course, you're surveying a broad range of theories and methods in media studies. Combining typically with an annotated bibliography that relates to your thesis idea. And we really are looking for very directed people who come here with an idea about what they want their thesis to be on, although it shouldn't necessarily just sort of be solidified and concrete, if you will. You want to be flexible and open enough that you're taking classes that sort of open your mind to different possibilities. But because it is such a fast-paced program of someone who had very, very squishy general ideas about, I don't know, my thesis will be on education. In the future, you know, too general. So we like a more sort of specific focus, so you can really hit the ground running with your studies and looking forward to your thesis. So you would end theories and methods one with an annotated bibliography. Typically that's a final assignment. And then theories and methods two ends with a proposal. So you would end theories and methods one with an annotated bibliography. Typically that's a final assignment. And then theories and methods two ends with a proposal. And then theories and methods two ends with a proposal for what your thesis will be on. That is like a whole-length seminar paper. Then you've got workshop one, which varies depending on who is teaching it, but tends to have a strong hands-on component. Major media text is a textual analysis class for thinking about the content of media, not just media as a technology, say. And then colloquium is a series I mentioned earlier that meets every Thursday that is part of your coursework, except all you have to do is register for it and show up. It's great. You don't have to write papers, you don't have to prepare ahead of time. You might look up who the speaker is because you might be really interesting to you and you want to network with them and you want to have a reception afterwards and you want to talk to them. Occasionally we are able to take people out to dinner together after colloquium. So it's a great opportunity to just sit back and learn things. And there's a lot of time for Q&A during those colloquiums, too. So it's a nice opportunity to learn new stuff, but also just to hang out with your community, basically. And then in the second semester, I already mentioned the theories and methods two. We had a workshop, too, and it never quite gelled the way we wanted. We kept changing what we were doing in that class and we weren't just turning the bullseye. And then we decided, aha, let's open it up. Let's give people more electives as a possibility. And so what we came up with was a list of managed electives that all had a kind of hands-on component, some kind of production element to them, whether that meant writing code or designing something. That's very general, designing something. And so we came up with a list of, Shannon, would you say it's about 15? A dozen now? About a dozen now. We could always add and subtract to that over time. We actually asked Nick Longford to develop a new class in computational expression so that students would have a place built for graduate students to learn about computational work. And then you have, so that's an elective but from a managed list. And then you have another open elective, which you could get here, but you could also take it at Harvard or Wellesley or MassArts. That doesn't happen too much, but people do tend to go to Harvard and sometimes they take something, say the School of Education. Sometimes people sort of would look back at Sloane, which has a media element to it, but very strong business orientation. And then you've got the colloquium once again. And then in your second year, for semester, media transition is a sort of transmedia historical class in media studies. You've got two electives and colloquium in the second semester, you've got your thesis and colloquium and optional elective, which is probably more, I don't know what you can choose, but sometimes people will just audit a class that would be useful for their thesis, for example, but they don't want to take that extra assignment score. The thesis. In a few examples, this is impossible to read from where you are, but maybe those watching the live stream had a better hand on it. So just a few examples, a thesis by Chris Kerich recently called critical breaking. To allow for reflective and critical examination, now since the instances of error break down the failure of additional systems. For example, how gamers work the system until it broke down and what happened there. Evan Higgins wrote a thesis called the Allure of Choice, Agency and World Building in Branching Path Transmedia Universes. So that was a much more textual oriented analysis than some of the more bigger technologically oriented outwardly analyses. Josh Cowles from Trump Tower to the White House in 140 characters. Come to me, right? In fact, then it was 140. The hypermedia and election of a paranoid coffeeless president. Then we had my Wagner technology against technocracy toward design strategies for critical communication technology, and one last example, George Siviaris. Everything is awful, snark as ritualized social practice in online discourse. So that gives you a nice sense of the rage. A number of our alums have written books. This was a nice example of someone who actually wrote a book written on their piece, Smallest Soldier from 2013, who had written a thesis called Distributed Denial of Service Actions and the Challenge of Civil Decisions on the Internet. And she wrote this book called The Coming Swarm. And she always liked to include a cheap, adorable picture of a cat in her PowerPoint presentations. I always try to do that in a long time, and I realize I'm proud to do that today. Another book by one of our graduates, Aslan Funafa-Fekkar. He's an associate professor of communication at the University of Michigan right now. He wrote a book called From Bombay to Bollywood and making it a global media industry. We've got Kandace Taliesin from the class of 02, How Climate Change Comes to Matter, the communal life of facts. And he is a champ remote to networking peripheries, technological futures, and the myth of digital universalism. Here's another one. Actually, Kevin Driscoll recently came and spoke at our colloquium on Minitel, class of 09, who has just co-operated a book on Minitel. Welcome to the Internet with another professor, Julie Town. Right, Jacobson wrote a film-study book, Studios for the System, Architecture, Technology, and Immersions of Cinematic Space. I'm almost done. Whitney Tretien from 09, Gaff Stutter. I don't know what that is. There's a full list of our alum right now on our website, so you can get a sense of what they're doing now, what they've done since graduation. So I won't go through all these names. I'll just read a lot of the lists at the bottom. We've seen careers in radio podcast, radio podcast strategists. I've got a fellow at the San Francisco Mayor's Office of Civic Innovation, manager of digital entertainment, at the Andy Warhol Museum, product manager for Apple Consumer Intelligence, program manager at Etsy, so that gives you a sense of the range. I already told you about the weekly colloquium series, right at home. And, of course, here is my website. That's my very quick run-through. I wonder, I'd like to open up the questions, but I would like to hear from a couple of people up here, too. I wonder if we could start with Jane, because I know she has to cut out for a lunch meeting, and maybe she could introduce herself and talk a little more about her research. Sure, do you want me to? Yeah, come on up here. You can stand up or just sit in that chair. All right, I'll stand up. Hi, how are you? Jane Wong. I'm a professor at CMS in Abu. Let me use one sentence to describe what I did. I'm interested in studying the impact of new media on commercial communication as in advertising. I'm also interested in the impact of social media on civic communication and civic communities. On the commercial side of things, one of the focuses of my work is on the changing fortunes of TV, digital, and social, and I look at them from the perspectives of branding and advertising research. Now, lately, I've been expanding my advertising research to the larger question of the changing media ecosystem in the US and in China, and I'm particularly drawn to what I would call a phenomenon of vertical crossovers, vertical crossovers, meaning tech companies are branching into, are crossing over into the media sector, competing with traditional content makers and traditional content distributors. And I can give you three examples. Apple, we all know, Netflix in the US, and Alibaba in China. So one of the branding questions in that area of research is how do we understand the ways that digitalization is shaping or is pushing industry boundaries? How do we understand the world of sectors without borders? So that's the commercial side of my research. On the civic side of things, I am a believer about the importance of practicing what we write about. So as Heather mentioned a few minutes ago, apart from teaching and doing research at MIT, I'm also running a nonprofit organization in China practicing ICQ-powered activism. So I have a foot in both worlds of commercial and civic because what to find out with technology is enabling the crossover of the previously unconnected works, for example, the market and the civic habitat. So this is a very quick, first idea of what I do. And Professor Heather also asked me to share the topics of some of the thesis that I've advised and supervised in the past. So I'm going to just give you a quick list of topics of the previous theme that's right in Singapore now. Okay, one of them is a case study of Ars Electronica, Future Lab. Ars Electronica is an Austrian cultural education with an scientific institute very active in the area in the field of new media art. Another thesis on the sixth generation of filmmakers in China and their relationship to documentary film making. And another thesis on advertising, electric science in Manhattan, New York between 1881 and 1917. Okay, and another one, a remake of Chinese animation. And then online BBS, BBS refers to the traditional internet forum system. And then a thesis on hidden activism, media practices and the media opportunity in the politics of resistance. Finally, a thesis on makers, hackers, and geeks in China, creativity in the Chinese technology community. So I know it's too early for you to think about your thesis, but this list hopefully will give you an idea about the broad range of research topics that the previous graduates used to work on, those for my work. Alright, so that's it, thank you. Thank you, thanks. I think it's helpful. I'll tell you a little bit about the thesis that someone's advised. Does she give you a sense of the range? I'll just add that the thesis list we just looked at, I advised the one on SNARK and online discourse and the one on Twitter and Trump. I also advised the project on digital literacy, a digital literacy project that was being undertaken in Brooklyn and providing students with tablets. And I also advised the thesis on podcasting and its impact on TV writers. And this was shortly after the writer's strike, which a lot of that was around podcast issues and like, you know, you're going to, who's going to pay for this stuff? You know, you'll be going to musicals on podcast, what is this meaning of the industry? So that gives you a little bit of sense of the kind of thesis work. Could we maybe hear from our two lab representatives who are here, like Kurt. If you could also talk about the classes that you teach. Yes, yes. I definitely will. So welcome. Good morning. It's great to see that many of you here. So my name is Kurt Fent. I direct HyperStudio, which operates in an area that's called visual humanities. I also have a joint appointment with global studies and languages where I teach in German studies, film classes and German culture classes. But HyperStudio is really concerned with the changes that the visual technology is impact on teaching, on learning, on research, and on the creation, the design in the humanities. So we have a number of projects, but we also develop technology. We do research in this field and we also do research in the public sphere. So we work what's called public humanities. Meaning, for example, we work with museums, we work with public archives, and so on. So it's really a very multifaceted approach to rethinking what these visual technologies mean for the humanities. So for example, we also work with faculty here at MIT, but also with outside partners. One of the projects, for example, deals with the diplomatic history between the US and Iran. So this is focusing on the miscommunication between the two countries, and as you can imagine, this is a highly political topic. So we look at declassified documents that have been produced on both sides and work with scholars in the field to basically rethink where things did go wrong. So we build the tools for that, exchange ideas and work with the scholars in the field to really come up with a new way of thinking what these tools and technologies and archives actually mean in that space. And that's also connected to a new initiative that we started a couple of years ago, which we call the Active Archives Initiative. And that's really about rethinking what digital archives mean nowadays. So it's a focus that we have, it's primarily on the end users. So what do end users really try to get out of an archive? So it's not so much focusing on the content that's in the archive, not focusing on the ways the archive gets produced and digitized, but it's really helping people work with archives. And this is a focus that we're trying to do also in the multiple spaces, in the educational space, in the research space, and also in the public space. And for that we also develop technologies. So we look at, for example, how can people create new layers of meaning, how can they create knowledge that's layered on top of the original archival material. So it has to do with story creation. It has to do with making connections and adding the content to those materials. So one of the students in the lab, he works on employing natural language processing and machine learning to think about how on the one hand the archival material can be analyzed, but on the other hand, also how the contributions by the users, for example through annotation or through news stories, can actually be combined and leveraged so that when you have thousands of users, they can still find aspects that are relevant for your own research. So it's going into that direction and rethinking, combining basically what we have done in graduate studio in terms of projects and we've done them for a long time. So we're one of the oldest research groups. And besides having graduate students like Rachel Thompson, who will be talking, I guess about what you work is yet in the studio as well. So we also teach classes. So there's a class on visual humanities, topics, techniques and technologies. And that's really looking into how the computational approach is focusing on a critical aspect of how we need to look at data in the humanities and how we need to critically look at visual representations in that class. We're also developing a new class that's focusing a little more on archives, data archives and interfaces. And for that we also collaborate with other teams in Germany and Switzerland. So there's also an international idea where students get involved in this research project. But these are all topics, not topics-based, also they have topics, but they're project-based classes. So students develop projects in a collaborative fashion and so on. So it's also a really multifaceted program and so there are constantly new projects coming on board depending on the collaborations and sometimes admittedly depending on the funding that we receive because that's always the issue. But it's a really interesting area of research and practice that HEPA Studio is involved in. Great. Thank you. Thanks. I'm going to pause in just one minute and suggest to you that if at any moment you need a cookie just get up and go for it. Don't be shy. That's there for you. Also I remember the name of Nick Montfort's three words only book in progress. One for the win! Right? So next we'll hear from Y.J. Kim. Hi, my name is Y.J. Kim and I'm a research scientist at HEPA System Spot. That's a lab directed by Justin Wright. I'm kind of representing a group of people within MIT campus who cares a lot about learning and teaching. How many of you guys are interested in education? Awesome. So there are two labs in this and I work at the systems lab and our mission is we investigate the complex technology-based classrooms of the future and the systems we need to help educators driving those studies. So we face a lot of our primary audience teachers and educators. There are three lines of work that we're doing within our own lab. We do online teacher education. So we launch two moves. One is about using system thinking tools to bring innovations within your schools and the other is about design thinking how teachers can use design thinking tools in their own classrooms and more kind of case studies of those teachers who are already doing that. So we have nine courses we belong to this year and they're helping teachers to bring different kind of practice to a different classroom. Another line of work we do a lot is for practice spaces. Within a a lot of graduate schools there is kind of this divide between same-members and clinicals. So it comes up teacher education pre-certed teachers for these classes and a lot about the theories of learning and teaching a lot of theories and then without having kind of concrete practice in between space they go to clinicals where they actually start teaching. So what we're doing is using games and simulations to prepare the kind of more playful authentic of practice spaces for teachers and case studies teachers. So I brought two kind of games as an example here so you can talk about it later. We create both non-visual and digital games for teachers. So for example this game called Data Refrict. It's a game about assessment. I'm coming from assessment design background and most people think that assessment is super boring and I need to survey. So we create this game to teachers can actually want about authentic assessment design based on what's in a playful manner. So these kind of are exemplified how things are doing. The last line then we're doing is playful assessment. There's a kind of collaboration between teaching systems lab and it's in our head lab where we're creating game-based assessment and training like this for teachers where they can learn about assessment and also thinking about assessment in spaces like major spaces where there's obviously a lot of each data structure generating but it's not much assessment because a lot of makers can believe that they can't be assessed and how we are designing what assessment can look like with that kind of conference. So those are kind of one of the work that we're doing in teaching systems lab. An education lab is directed by a clockwork lab and more K-12 student-facing work. So like STEM learning, VR, games, where you can learn about STEM cells and things like that and like math games and things like that. So these are kind of two groups within MIT where we're using technology for education systems. Thank you. Now I have another place where game design is going on and on their website you can get a sense of the games you've made in the past. I'll just segue right into Claudia Lowe telling you about Game Lab but she's one of our students. She can also talk about some of her experiences here as a student. I'll do the student quote question. Okay, great. So I'm Claudia Lowe. I'm a second student. I'm a second student. I'm a second student. I'm a second student. So I'm Claudia Lowe. I'm a second year student at CMS. I'm also an international student. So I have many of you who are non-U.S. citizens. So I can talk a little bit about that experience. But yeah, I'm primarily here today because how dare they, all of the lab managers of the Game Lab are doing their jobs and teaching. So I'm here to tell you about the Game Lab. So at the Game Lab we make games and we play games and we study them and we sort of specialize in the advantages that kind of can bring to the table when it comes to researching and teaching. So for example, we have very close ties to that arcade and I think also to ICE that's the Imagination, Creativity and Expression Lab that's headed up our box for all. So we're not the only lab that does games here at CMS. So for example, two of the projects that I participated in in our lab is we have one long-term topic on looking at how Player 2 gets designed in games. And this started off looking purely at video games but also has expanded to incorporate board games. So we don't discriminate between board games versus traditional games versus video games that we kind of count all of them as on-door preview. Another project that I'm on right now is looking at representations of colonialism in board games specifically representational aspects. Not in the game art, not just in sort of the fantasy of the concierge behind the board game, but actually in sort of one of the little pieces. What do they look like? How do you move them? More of that kind of thing? My own research right now, so I'm neck deep in thesis territory right now and my thesis is looking at the social and communicative work that online volunteer moderators do. So these are the people who spend while they were removing the bad comments on websites and sort of looking at what they're doing outside of just removing things or those things of comments or people and like banning them from the site way not anything more demonstrative. My lab mate Kaila Nijbo-Myerskoff, her thesis is on affect emotion and intimacy in games and how we achieve the sense of intimacy while we play and seeing if there are mechanics in games that encourage that sort of emotional affective response. So that is the short version. I will say that the caveat to like game lab, you think this means game design all the time, actually don't have a background in CS or in code. While it's certainly an option like that tends to come out of classes or even thesis work but support for kind of coming up with tools or finding tools generally comes through the lab and comes through sort of my research assistantship and working with them. I have two more students before we open up for Q&A. Ashka. Hi everybody, my name is Ashka Deve. Like Claudia I am a second year CMS student which means I am also neck deep in thesis work. I also have a tendency to talk softly so please tell me to speak up about it. It's really hard, I'm working on it. I am the research assistant for RAP which as Heather mentioned is MIT's Writing, Rhetoric and Professional Communication program. RAP fits a unique space within the MIT community because in addition to being a part of CMS they oversee the communication intensive courses for the MIT undergrads. So this means that they have a number of instructors who go into courses specific to engineering or into more humanities oriented courses to talk specifically about communication to provide instruction in those practices and to help students become better communicators. And this means that a large part of their research focus is also on how can we help students communicate better. So at present the research project we're working on is focusing on mapping out critical processes of thinking in different fields. Those fields at present include fields like material science and engineering, brain and cognitive science, comparative media studies. In order to create maps or outlines that students can then use as they try to write papers or work on their first writing projects as undergrads to help people who might be too in the weeds in their own field as beginning learners and researchers figure out how to take things forward and communicate their work effectively. So in a nutshell that's what we're working on. As a part of CMS my thesis is looking at how practices of audience engagement have become inculcated in news organizations. So what does it mean if someone's a social media editor or someone's working on audience engagement and how does that play into sensationalism especially when society thinks that they might be at risk in certain situations for a given disease? Feel free to ask more questions about that later if you would like to and let's see if there's anything else. My background's in journalism so if you have specific questions about going from journalism to something that's not journalism feel free to ask about that as well. Oh yes that's a very good point. Alright so I'm currently the chair of the halls at Sydney Pacific which is one of the graduate residence communities on the MIT campus. In the halls I'm in charge of the hall counselors and the general well-being of somewhere between six and seven hundred residents in SIDPAC and if you have any questions specific to the well-being of students on campus specific to how graduate housing works for students specific to just like the general community life on campus at MIT I am also a very good person to ask about those. Thank you. Hi everybody my name is Rachel Thompson and I'm a first year CMS student so I'm only like ankle deep in thesis and we're not yet we love this sort of quicksand we're kind of a quicksand so I don't have too much to say on that I'm a research assistant in Hypers Studio which as Kurt explained is the digital humanities lab at MIT I have a couple of different projects that I work on in the lab I make a weekly newsletter that gathers the digital humanities news across like basically the internet so you should sign up for that it's very informative, very useful I also am a teaching assistant for his digital humanities class so I go to the class and help lead discussion and kind of present on things I have a background in art museums and art I worked at the Harvard Art Museums and I worked at the PBSX Museum up in Salem in their media departments and a project called Art Bot and I could talk to you a little bit more about that but it's on the back burner right now but we're hoping to get it back up I work on another project which is Annotation Studio which falls under the Active Archives Initiative it's a tool that is an online tool for collaborative annotation especially in pedagogical situations like in the classroom so classes can all look at the same text all annotate it and everyone can kind of read each other's annotations as kind of a springboard for talking in class discussion or like an understanding text and at the same time we're hoping to develop a new tool which is Idea Space which is to create help you outline essays from the annotations that you would make in Annotation Studio so you can kind of see where we're going from reading and writing and better understanding close reading to better understanding the writing process so we're currently working on an NEH proposal for that right now otherwise I can't tell you much about theses I'm interested in the representations and incarceration across media but that's about as far as I've gotten Great, thank you Alright I would like to thank you first about the Design Lab Do you have anything to say? Sure I can't relate so stay in the lab Hi everyone I am Ian I'm from the Blue Tears Lab, Design Lab I'm a co-director there with Professor Casaleño He's also teaching, of course, the designing interactions At our lab we're a very multidisciplinary lab we have students from all five schools within MIT from architecture to engineering to humanities and we work our focus is on applying human-centered design and experience design so we work all of our lab projects are sponsored and we work with cost industries from gluten nutrition to connected devices and lighting so currently we have one CNS student working with us in our connected lighting project in seeing how we can situate technology of lighting devices, connectivity IOT and all of those for the future of the parent city the project that we've done in the past which we had multiple CNS students and was our caring city project which was a very ethnically focused project where we had students not just from the DMS but also from different departments pooling and doing research on projecting the future trends and to understand where we should go as a study towards what kind of experiences and services and products we should provide within the caring city we're currently about 15 to 20 people from grad students to undergrad students to fully research stuff so this could be another lab that you can also take in if you join us. Thank you. Anyone else? Okay, then we are open for Q&A I work in teamwork on public education and things is that standard for grad students to have their work published in journals or like outside of the YouTube? There's no sort of standardized system in place for here's how you're going to publish a piece by the end of your first or second year that we don't work that way I was thinking in particular of the fact that some professors collaborate with students like Lisa Parks has collaborated with her graduate students she co-edited a book with one for students in a library before she came here other students worked together to give conference presentations Kaelan has a piece forthcoming I believe Kaelan has a piece forthcoming on how I just published one in September about queer temporality games and the most of us so the research we did part of that we wrote up on paper and both Kaelan and I Kaelan is my lab mate both of us got fellowship credit on that with our minor directors so we published that last January so there are opportunities I don't know if you guys have any experiences I think it depends a bit if you're looking to publish through your lab with your research or system work I think it depends a little bit at the research that lab is in so if it's very preliminary if it's still got data that's where it's going to be I've had the opportunity to help get those to a stage where they're ready to be published it's just helpful to remember that your professor the faculty are here it's kind of meant worse to you so if you write a paper for them and they're like aha this is publishable or if you come to them and say I actually would like to publish because I want to go to graduate school in a year or two you know you can work collaboratively to up your credentials in that area and we've done that in our studio as well so involving the RAs in publishing the work that has come out of the lab so museums on the web and some other outlets including also writing proposals for conferences for example then also for conference proceedings and so on so it's always a collaborative work most of these labs have some kind of deliverable which might be in a white paper that they need you to collaborate on in the case of open doc lab students will quite often go to Sundance the film festival and they will blog about that so there might be kinds of informal writing such as blogging compared to more formal published work what do you look for most in statement of objectives previous achievement research experience personal story related to this era or anything that's a good question personal stories are nice because they give you a sense of what the person is like I will say a long story about here's how I came to love the Dungeons and Dragons we see those many times a long personal story about why you love games it's a nice opener but don't go off in too much in that direction we really want to hear about what your interests are your objectives and you know the kinds of experiences that you bring to the program that would be unique that would benefit us and you we do sometimes take people right out of college that happens but usually yay but quite often it's someone who's been out for a year or two maybe a little bit more because we like that level of life experience and work experience and I would say also sometimes people might have undergraduate training and something that is not that has applicability to what we do but they don't have a super background but then they go out and they make documentary film for two years or they work for an interesting out for profit and it increases their credentials in that area and sort of makes them into a media study student in a way that they might not have been right out of undergrad so any of the specific kind of intellectual and work related experiences that help convey who you are and what your interests are would be helpful in your statement of objectives also of course you submit a writing sample which should be scholarly work of substance and that conveys your interests but it also conveys your basic writing skills and your approach to writing and so on and occasionally someone will will get in his writing sample it's not really about media at all but they clearly have the chops for the program they have the background they have the race but what they had available as a writing sample might have been an undergraduate art history paper that wasn't directly relevant to us but it showed creativity and thoughtfulness and an ability to do a deep kind of research so there is some kind of flexibility I guess in what will be where there is no one formula yes I'm done so just bouncing off of that I'm a little bit more career right now I've been working in tenure for the last 10 years in non-profit communications primarily feminist and women's rights and human rights organizations producing all kinds of content and I've been interested about your program for a while now come to this open house and see I was curious if in terms of writing and what I'm looking for is really to get like some kind of a I feel like we all are struggling with this information saturation and how do we and I was really fascinated by some of the projects that came out of the program so I was really curious about is this a place for somebody who's been writing for a while but who wants to do something out of the box with the skills and also some of the technical skills and training Yes Yeah, what you described sounds like something that would certainly be of interest to us. What kind of writing have you done? All kinds like I'm speechless from my director to producing podcast scripts so I've done a range of writing but I also know that I think we're writing for new audiences it's not the same like even from when I started my career to now I think so much has changed right we're fighting attention span, we're fighting so much so I think the struggle has become different to the you know writing so and that's why I was curious like I'm a radio producer at heart but now the world of podcast is like you know you're competing with so much but there is also a lot of good content out there there's a way to kind of advocate that so I want to be building something I've been struggling the last couple of years with building something and be like okay this is something that is not adding to the noise so I think and I thought this program might be like a space to kind of reflect and do something. Yeah that just points to a really interesting sort of non-traditional background for an applicant we definitely do get applicants from people who are mid-career pretty often and so I would encourage you to apply I'll add that sometimes with people have been away from school for a long time they don't have a range that's on hand that makes sense to them or that 5-page paper or panel that I did and sometimes people will write something from scratch specifically for the application just like the nature of contemporary podcasting you know something that's up their alley but they write a research paper on that topic specifically for the application. Regarding the English efficiency requirement specifically about who we were who received or will we receive a back-up degree from an English-speaking institution? Yeah that's what I did I did my undergraduate degree in America also and so my degree was issued from entirely English-speaking you don't think it was not a problem at all? It is the same for those who will be who will not graduate but will be graduated by the time they enroll into the program? Yes If you have or will have by the time you matriculate a degree from an English-speaking university you can raise the IELTS requirement for the application It must be verifiable by transcript so when you upload your transcript it needs to be in English and I need to be able to by a very quick search verify that your course was taught in English Very specific Do graduates tend to stay in one lab for both years or do they kind of switch around Yeah they do tend to stay in the same lab There's a very rare thing where someone will switch out for various reasons that we really like to keep people in that same lab for the two years And to expand on that do you have an objective switch lab you would like to work on or do you choose when you come in There is a space and we might I'll talk to Shannon about this later but we might tweak this a little bit how people indicate their lab interest in the application because what we find is if we say what lab would be interested people tend to list like eight or nine labs because they're all very interesting and so although it's fine to express an interest we're typically looking at your qualifications to see where you might be the best fit and then by the time we get to the semifinalist stage we have a maybe too many details but we have typically five groups of two professors or research managers or a range of people who are examining everything and making the cut from a hundred to 80 to 60 so by a final mean we're at like 35 so by the time we're at the semifinalist stage we like to show all the applications to the PIs and the lab managers so that they can red flag anyone that they're like yeah that person looks like a good match for me and so it's a mix of your state of preference but also what we see looking at your qualifications so it's not the most pressing part of your application to click off I would like to be in these five labs everything else that I think is fair to say is more important How often do students go for PhD after pushing a master's program? I would say about 30% of the time typically of the class of 10 about 3 of them will go on for a PhD program and pretty often right out of the master's program especially if there's someone who took 3 or 4 years off between undergrad and coming here or even more time to keep the momentum going and go on to the next stage Do they continue here or somewhere else? Occasionally yes, we will have students go into which program is Eric Stateman STS, STS Science and Technology Studies I don't think we've had students go right to the media lab in the PhD lab we have oh right of course so the media lab can you think of other graduate programs here? Gus Urban Studies, Urban Studies Thank you so we have a range of people who do stay at MIT but that's I wouldn't say every year somebody stays at MIT among the state 3 or so who go on to graduate studies we have people applying for a lot of programs in California in particular a couple in New York Harvard you don't have to move so it is it is a mix I would say maybe half of them can go west coast just because there's some great programs we have someone at Chris Carritch who did the critical breaking sound input is right now I'm pretty sure yeah sort of back on the writing thing what difficulties would there be coming from and not? like I went to school for animation and now I'm in college so I don't really have a whole lot of academic experience the same way that anybody that went to normal art school would it's hard to it really depends on what your whole portfolio of experiences looks like if someone conveys that they are articulate and use the language nicely in their state with their objectives they have a solid writing example then the fact that they have not come from a conventional academic background for the past five or ten years is fine in fact it's a plus because you bring life skills to someone else wouldn't and so I'll just keep it there open-ended I should have more about if you're looking for anything specific in the portfolio section portfolio is kind of value-added if you put things in your portfolio we will look at them but it will often be the lesson we look at we're looking at the basics first the writing and the transcript but then the portfolio is nice because if you say that you're a game designer and you write a paper about this amazing game you created and you link it up we're going to take a look some people put up art say they were in comics it would make sense to put your comics work under the portfolio so you can see what you're doing and so it's a very helpful supplement especially for someone from a less dimensional background it's more than a supplement it will pull you up potentially that said if you don't have something for your portfolio that is okay too not everyone has more to have a variety of creative material so I just want to share how things work for you it's useful I'm kind of curious about the business but I'm curious about the evolution of your business I'm curious to know you mentioned that people usually have a strong sense of what they want to pursue so I'm curious if that's what you're going to stop with what kind of ideas do you want to explore do you want to go first or should I so when I applied here my undergraduate background was in film and media and gender studies but I was also sort of a self-taught of games studies and so when I came here statement of gender etc emphasized sort of my work in peer game studies and when I got here in the weekend I was like I'm not writing about that I'm not writing about moderators because I'm also a moderator I've done it for a long time and I was like actually I want to write about this now I've since sort of compromised because the mods that I'm looking at are working in these words related areas so it's like nicely matched bridge those two and I will say I settled on that topic after we can kind of have stuff with it through till now so I settled here in the case where I won't I think a lot of us had an idea I would say that mine came in a similar vein it was definitely more of a funnel process I started kind of broad with the fact that I had these seemingly disparate interests in like social media and how news organizations work and also public health and then I think the question that I asked myself over the first year of the program was how can I mix these together and find interesting and exciting that I would want to work on for another year and over the course of asking myself that question repeatedly particularly given that in our theories and methods courses our professors make us poke and prod at what we're interested in over the course of the assignments it narrowed down into something that was like an actual question that I was excited about looking at and answering and thinking about in more detail You want to give it a shot even though you're only ankle deep Yeah I have a background in I wrote my undergraduate thesis on a digital literary magazine so I'm like shifting basically what I need now and like looking at incarceration and I did practice in prison reform on the prison advocacy so that's kind of why I'm now looking at incarceration but I came in originally I was interested in education specifically in situations of incarceration however there are like very strict standards about doing research with youth and so prisons and youth is like the worst combination that you could have so now I'm kind of in lieu of that I'm circling by looking at like the politics of representation and crime media rather Now I'm just going to pause for a second because Vicky Zimmer is one of our grad students who just came in. Vicky would you want to join us up here? And would you mind giving a little intro to yourself and maybe talking a bit about your thesis and your lab assignments? Yeah, absolutely, thanks But I'm Vicky I'm a second year in CMS I'm working with Lisa Parks in Global Media Technologies and Cultures Lab My own thesis is on how the fine dining industry is wrestling with the ever-changing nature of digital media and communication so for example like how does food porn and Instagram influence or is it considered by three Michelin star chefs and sort of like taking like a historical look at how fine dining wrestled with technology change and then also looking at today with what they're doing with it and within my lab it's a little different than my own research interests but I actually really enjoy that because I think it's kind of nice to have some separation and it's also showing me a lot of areas within communication and media technology that I never would have explored myself so I'm really appreciating getting a totally new perspective and Professor Parks is fantastic so I'm really happy with that Good, yeah Thanks Yes, I have a question from the internet Are the GRE scores weighed as more equally or less important than the statement of objectives slash writing slambles slash GPA or experience I think it varies from application to application how relevant GRE scores if we see a pattern of someone who is not a very strong writer and they're saving a purpose in their writing sample and they had low GRE scores, wrap if someone has exceptionally strong writing skills and yet they had a low verbal skill we realize well maybe you're not very good at taking standardized tests that happens you know or someone might have much higher verbal skills than their math skills you know we are not especially about math we are about self-expression and these are your own skills so it varies from application to application is it overall really good to have the highest GRE scores that you can? Yes, certainly but that said I do recognize that people are not terrific in standardized testing No questions let's say we target internet consumers I know this is a program that will award the Master of Science degree and I wonder does that does this program count as a standard program? No Sorry I wish this is a question for the students I was wondering how we on your thoughts about how this program has helped you with networking whether it's inside or outside of the CMS program I've been talking a lot I don't want to start I and actually this is one of the things I'm great at making compromises for because she encouraged me to be thinking about once you write your thesis who do you want to show it to and has been helping me to connect with academics and the industry that I'm looking at and sometimes the formal sometimes the informal again if you have the chance to publish with your life that can be great especially if you're going to present it at a conference so you can get funding through also to just be independent but to have conferences on your own and those are always really great places to meet people in your field the colobians are another good example so every week the program will invite me because there are not so many opportunities to talk to people or you can even suggest people that the program should bring to talk to CMS so that's always a nice opportunity because there's just a lot of people who can just be here and go and show up and to add on that I think coming from MIT it really helps you get your door and your foot in the door sorry I just woke up like an hour ago and for example just emailing people that are visiting Harvard or visiting MIT and being like I'm also a grad student at MIT it's been nice to come to you it's been pretty nice but also I think you have to take the initiative saying okay I want to meet these kind of people and once you take that initiative there are people that will help you I always go to Shannon and be like do you know anybody who does this and she's like oh I know all these people let me let them up or Andrew or with your professors but nobody's going to be like I would like to meet these people in this field do you know anyone and then it's easy from there he said about that I think oftentimes when I think of networking it's more like who would I be very interested in talking to or asking questions and then if I have that level of interest then I'm like okay let me just send them an email or find someone who knows their email and then just do it that way or maybe they're giving a talk because there's lots of people giving talks at MIT and I'm like hi I think I'm also the sort of person who if I see an event that says networking in big letters I will not go it's just not happening in that sense I'm actually kind of appreciative that CNS does not say go to this networking event for me that would be just like a very insubstantive waste of time I do not enjoy those so they exist you can go to them if you want to I personally have avoided all of those with great success and I think I've still been pretty good at networking just because there are lots of really cool people here doing very cool things and if you get in touch and you're like hi I want to talk to you because your stuff is cool then they're usually like yeah I'd love to do that people enjoy talking about themselves and also like CNS is really a department where if you want to do something and you take the initiative like you can pretty much do what you want so like if I decided okay we don't have a networking event for alums or people in this but if I was like hey Heather and Shannon can we have like a little coffee thing for CNS alums in Boston I'm more than 100% sure and Andrew too that they would help me figure out how to make that happen so it's kind of like what's the program you want it to be and how can you help make it that networking means like me people I could be built in but not like business school where you have like once a week these events where you have to go and talk with a name tag we industry leaders font leaders like LinkedIn influencers yeah so I can have an idea of perspective so ladies and gentlemen what part of the opportunity is for students to work with faculty um the students can speak to that I will say that you have elective opportunities and manage the open electives and that is how you might work with someone say in the media lab or you might go up to the Birken Center the Birken Center for Internet Studies and there has been law and society so it is a prior question of initiative you know going to your talks or through the classes here or through the classes that you take or even not necessarily working with faculty so I can like release her first game and that was all working with classmates actually undergraduates from MIT because they were having a co-ing and I think she did some of the lighting on the art so she made a game but it started and that's how she met people and then with PC I was thinking with people with like rears yeah I think Cloudy and I both have like industry academics I would call them Microsoft New England Research Research Department Microsoft Research Center Microsoft Nerd they're literally across the road they're like actually next door to us and there are some amazing amazing people who work there and they come to Columbia and they have talks there go check out their interviews dollars and so on so that's it I'm glad you mentioned like some research that's another networking opportunity so when you write your thesis you'll have an advisor who's somebody who's CMS faculty that you work closely with and sort of like share your ideas, share your draft but you also have to have one other reader and they don't have to come to CMS so we ask people to come up so we really like your work and this is what my thesis is about would you be interested in being my reader and what that means is generally they get like an advanced copy of your thesis like a couple of months before you're handed in so they get a reader first and they get a review next and they said yes but also last year there was a project that I was really interested in in the media lab because I do sort of the food technology and social media and they were using food and big data and looking at communities there and I just emailed them and said hey I'm like writing my thesis on this can I please figure out what's going on and like once a week I touched base with them and got to kind of help a little bit on the project but it is you have to watch out your time because you don't have a lot of it but it was like part of my thesis and they said hey people are pretty friendly in that respect if there's something you're interested in just send them an email or show up at their lab if they don't respond I think I'm going to give a fully satisfied factory response to that the open back lab is not a technical lab where they sit around building VR equipment and headsets all day for sure they are bringing film makers the reason they're not here today is they have a deskie firm to they get they're very very fundraisers and they get equipment from like they can go to they have all the gear they have all the gear they can go to someone and say where the MIT open back the factory lab do you want to share with us yes we do what do you think do you want to test it out and so that's you know where the equipment comes in so it's not a sort of building lab with southern irons so they're using the equipment they are you just add it in the VR class to the curriculum the curriculum that will be taught for them I think it was taught as a special taught this class once and then it will be taught as a programming class this spring and obviously that's not just the theory of history of virtual reality but again it's not but that is to say there are a few people that have been RAs in the open doc lab that their thesis work is more hands-on and I think that's really complimented their work as RAs very well so I know a lot of people that have been open doc lab RAs have had more technical project-based thesis work or at least have technologies as a complimentary component to a thesis project and that might happen a little bit more without them in some other way but there's no one here from the Imagination Computational Instruction Lab and I do want to know more about this lab and I also discovered that it's also listed under the C-cell software so I'm just curious to... I would recommend you emailing Fox-Harrell who runs that lab he is not here for me on research leave but he has a lot of experience with students who want to know more about your lab and he has is it an impressive point in the channel with C-cell or yeah so he works with computer science graduate PhD students so he's working with our master students but he's working with PhD students but he could tell you more will he be looking at more technical background or he will not be looking at any applicants this year because he is on leave so he will not be doing committee work on that committee presumably but when we review applicants we're always thinking who could this person potentially work with and so for example even if someone were on leave we might say hey look at these three students you're just having one of them in your lab next year you know look at the whole group who looks appropriate for you so because he is running a lab he's someone you would check in with but he wouldn't be doing the sort of prep work over a few hundred applications you don't have to worry about working in an area and your person is not leaving work it's absolutely not the case I have another question from the internet yes in the program how much of the workload is essays versus hands on work and for the thesis is it possible to do a journalism project or start-up idea for instance most of the work by which I mean more than 50% that you are graded on is going to be essay work there's also going to be people with presentations there's not some group projects but the majority of work is the written work and I would have to see specifically what the project was but the short answer is that no one is going to write a thesis that's their pitch for a start-up company and he has something to count as an academic research project a new master's degree so that said you might write a thesis that helps you start up that 501c3 when you get out of here that lays down the groundwork for what you want to do or lays out the key questions that you go to funders with or into a foundation with so it's not that that work is unrelated to study funding to start-up but the thesis itself would not be I guess I'm interested in hearing from the students what you think sets MIT's program apart from other media studies programs or maybe why you decided to come to this program yes I can go first alright so as I said before my backgrounds in journalism and I was working at the AP in New York for a year before I came here and when I started thinking about grad school I was like this is really great but there are so many gaps in my knowledge there are other things related to media but that aren't necessarily journalism that I'm interested in and possibly want to work with for someday so when I was looking for grad programs I did apply to a couple of journalism ones but I also applied to CMS because it's more broad the scope is different you can look at more issues more things you get to explore more because CMS is very very interdisciplinary in a way that many other programs are not and for me that was the big draw because you get to work with media in so many different capacities that might not be possible in your programs yeah and I also kind of agree with that I was I majored in American studies in media arts and sciences which is like computer science design so two interdisciplinary majors and I still wanted to continue that comparative look at technology and so for me when I was looking at programs I was looking at what communication programs also have cross pollination with human computer interaction or at least around resources like that and a lot of the communication programs I was looking at were like political focused or health focused or seemed very focused and so I really wanted to go somewhere where I could have like this core of media studies and communication but I could talk to people in computer science really readily or I could talk to somebody who studied virtual reality and this stuff or I could go and talk to a chef and that those sort of ventures off would be normalized in a way and I went to have to fight against being able to have like an anthropology person in my thesis and what would the perspective they would get because we were communications department and so in CMS I feel like every single person is doing something totally different from each other and I love that because it really allows you to be empowered to like have the perspective you want to take while still having a lot of other perspectives of people who have also done kind of different things and how do you make sure it's legitimate while also new when interdisciplinary past BCs and it didn't seem like there was a performance like they were all completely different and then the same with the faculty writing so the books that we published and articles published by faculty and they were all over too which meant that even if I came with an idea of my thesis other areas were totally abstract in my case I was more I was so I'm very focused on studying I do I wanted to study and criticize them that not necessarily make them and game studies as a thesis you know so pretty young and a lot of even graduate level programs that deal primarily with games have a very kind of professional development oriented outlook so I was looking for something that wasn't that the other thing I was looking at actually when I was applying was all the media studies but what motivated my decision to come here was really that like I I was comfortable with some of the media theory but I didn't want to have to constantly justify why I was applying for games and similarly I didn't want to go along sort of a development focus games track because I didn't want to justify why I wasn't making anything and so this was a you know a really great opportunity and really very place for me to kind of bring those two together and also the other nice thing about interdisciplinary is that no one's going to yell at you if you decided straight outside of your field and like use methods from another discipline because like yeah it seems impossible that's what everyone's doing and you know we see the strength of that and that's been enormously helpful yeah and I also want to add one thing what I liked about CMS is that there were people who went into academia and there were people that went into industry and it was totally accepted where a lot of the academic programs I was looking at like we're training future scholars and if you end up going into industry it's like you sort of have betrayed your professors or you have let yourself down by not getting an academic job and CMS it's both are like viewed completely the same way in terms of how people respect them and how people will help you get to where you want to be and so that was really important for me because I didn't know if I was going to go I felt like I was going to go into PhD but I need time off I was like I'm not sure and I don't want to go down a path where I'm going to finish and the only option is to go into academia I want to be somewhere where I can finish my master's and say okay I'm going to continue into a PhD or no I'm going to go and work in industry and I have the tools I need to do that and I feel like CMS is definitely enabling me to have those dual options these are all really helpful answers I'll add that you know there's questions in the application you indicate where else to be applied helpful for us to see the range of your interest that way and that part of the application is not for you it's just for information but a number of people do apply to both PhD programs and master's programs and then they see where they get in and then they sort of balance everything and figure out what are my priorities and for some the tipping point is to do this prestigious PhD program do I want academia being a professor is my only option when I'm done for some people so yeah I had to make that decision I was choosing between a PhD and here and from here you can always go on to get a PhD but once you're in the PhD you can't go back and do CMS it's true it's difficult once you're tainted as a PhD and as a PhD professor and of course then the difficulty is that the job market is particularly proper so it's very very shall we say Armenian environment for PhDs and so you get a master's degree that opens you up to a lot of different options one in the PhD but other ones being industry whatever you just have more options this is a cross check it seems to be getting close to that but what are the comparables from here and I understand I see the value of this program but I just wondered just as an exercise what would you compare this program to and how are you different from it by name and are there programs where that are less writing based for instance as a way of compare there are technically oriented programs is there a game program at NYU for example that is a NYU ITP is like a lot more hands-on if you're more of like a maker I would suggest that or the media lab hands-on and you will not be doing writing yeah there are a number of master's programs in limited areas like documentaries like it, I mean the USANFREWS has a documentary training program right now there is a program in social justice and documentary at the new school for social research in New York City right which would train you to do exactly that for social justice documentaries so there are some very specific there is there is comparing media studies existing as an undertaking I guess at Columbia University but I do not believe that they currently have a graduate program that is still in the works I need to misspeak because there are many streaming some professors say how dare you but I believe that they do not have a patient recording I have a question from the interwebs for the students what do students do in the summers are there resources for research travel I can start again so this past summer I interned at Google doing user research user experience research in the research and machine intelligence group there I did have past professional experience in UX research as well but before I got that I was planning on going to Spain and doing field work and I was going to get funding through MIT Spain to do that so there are options I am not familiar with CMS options for summer independent thesis work but there are a bunch of random cases at MIT that have money for students to do things in the summer I knew did you get PKG okay so then there is the PKG what is the same portion and I am sorry it is the Priscilla K. Gray service fund and we had I think two students this past summer who used that fund for their summer work so I think Aziria who is in our year went to Argentina Aziria was in Buenos Aires and working with an alum I think or maybe not I don't know it wasn't my project I'm sorry but then also Marielle who is also a second year got funding from there to run a student media workshop in East Boston this summer so the short answer is what I do during the summer is they do thesis research you hear up for whatever you need to for your thesis work in your second year sometimes in the summer you realize hey my thesis is not that good at all oh no and that's productive too you know you read 20 or 30 books and realize this isn't exactly what I want to do but people need to do field work do that over the summer people need to gather data graphic research do that over the summer there are a lot of pots of money at MIT that you can apply for not specifically through CMS though but for summer work as far as I know the Kelly Douglas Fund is for research travel and can be used for research travel but it's a relatively small amount but that's generally most often for conference travel during the school year there are some students do summer internship at Microsoft Research which does provide funding summer internships so there's a lot of opportunities out there but you have to be a kind of go-getter it's going to just be like there's 10 grand for the summer you have to be applying for stuff and getting out there and finding stuff and of course Shannon and others are always there to help and send to the website especially just to find the little as I said the pots of money at MIT because it is such a well funded institute and there are so many different kinds of things you might not think of you might be thinking I want to do and be looking for media when you should be looking for Mexico City you should be looking for international funding instead of thinking about your specific media projects yeah and I do have a tip of advice I wish I was applying for grants for my research right when I got here rather than waiting until my second year because it takes foundations like a year to give you money yeah sorry I can't wait on the coffee so I like I found all these pots of money but they take months and months to process and so now that I'm the beginning of my second year they're like we can give you the money in April and like that's hopefully we'll be done so if you know that you're going to need money for some general topic maybe you don't know specifically where when you get here start looking as a related issue is if you're doing ethnographic work and you need an IRB we call it yeah you're going to have to plan ahead for that they're pretty fast when you get going but you don't want to just show up to do research and then realize I didn't make the proper protocols dealt with absolutely so Heather today I've got the question about what are the programs people have because you've done one. Is that your communications person that you're actually packing for? I'm looking at my marks of the programs that I check out every once in a while the only one that jumps out is typically hands on is Georgia Tech's Masters in Digital Media yes that's a very good example we compete with a lot of programs that are much more theory or the traditional academic so there's the modern culture program at Brown there's R&R History and Digital Studies at Duke there's ones that are a little bit closer to what we do it's the communication culture and technology program at Georgetown is one if you look at the program man if you want the first 10 plus years anybody that will need to offer a mission to you that always came here it was a long time before anybody wanted another program the ones that they had in the last several years have been PhD programs we almost never lose an ad bit yeah that's absolutely right people do a PhD program or occasionally someone got in but oh they just got an amazing job and they can do that so going back to school I can't think but it is unusual for students out to another Masters program we haven't heard from you yet sorry first other than McMuffin's laboratory is there somewhere else that's doing some literary writing related to sound because I'm the thing I have in my mind is like doing something and about the listening experiencing what I suggest called the promotion media so I think like I don't like my project would not really fit into one lab and I'm not sure if I should apply here to CMS or to DOS maybe because like I don't want to be in a rough I'm in a rough manner I want to review the theory and what you got thinking relating sound cities from a literary perspective that's my background so maybe it's not a really specific question but what a person you are we're pointing out oh yeah because that's relevant you're absolutely right that Trump tank is the place that would potentially be doing work that would be a great interest to you but that doesn't mean that it would be in Trump tank if you came here depending on who else got in where people fit whether or not Trump tank has any funding that year what grants they have in the works and so on so you do not want to come here specifically just because I got to go to MIT because I work in game lab and you just page your spot that is not a good criteria and I think we're coming here that said if you want to work let's say that you want to be an open doc lab you've got a tech studio but open doc lab has meetings almost every week with guest speakers and free sandwiches you can participate in other labs civic media lab we have not been able to place people in the civic media lab for two years or something like that people attend those lab meetings if they choose to how much time do you have in the day but people who can find ways to connect with the labs but not necessarily working for and if you're open to connecting in that way but it's not so your research assignment or your work to earn your way that's fine but I would not recommend anyone choosing us just because I got to be the scientist in one lab and all because you need to be more helpful can we like apply for two programs oh yes yes if you wanted to apply you can apply for as many programs as you want yes oh I'm sorry we had one question over here on the menu how people are assigned to a thesis advisor or how they pick a thesis advisor you're not assigned you pick an advisor can you speak to it a little more directly I think so the way I went about it is when I started thinking of a thesis topic I kind of looked at the list of course CMS faculty because your primary thesis advisor has to be from CMS and I was just like hi I'm thinking about these things can I come meet with you for a bit to talk about this and I think I did that with three different professors towards the end of her semester beginning of the second semester and sort of after my thought process had kind of taken more shape I went to two of them at the end of the spring semester and I talked to them again and sort of based on that discussion and asking them like how do you work as an advisor what is your process for working with grad students I went back to one professor and I was like okay would you be my thesis advisor so for me it was a process of thinking about what the professor is interested in what I'm interested in also how the professor functions as an advisor like do they want to meet you once a week do they require that you make a calendar with deadlines like how does that professor work what do they bring to the table and then after talking to them and just generally seeing how I felt taking one I think it's good to just point to the fact that you need the right topic match so we can help you with your ideas but you also need the right sort of approach to work and workflow and some people really need a lot of hand-holding and need a very very tight step so other people prefer to be more self-directed and you need to find the advisor that will be the right match for you on those terms I was just going to say for me like the biggest consideration is who had the theoretical or topic background and the working style was a huge thing for me because I'm somebody that I like being self-directed I don't like having tight deadlines I just get anxiety and do nothing I'm much better at just have it done by February and I'll do it no work hopefully we don't know yet but so it was really important for me to find a professor who would be okay with trusting me with that space but I also knew that when I sent them an email with work I wanted them to look at they would be able to give me relevant feedback because as I said I want my thesis to be able to be read by people in the food industry not just be like a very academic text so I didn't want to be working with a professor who's always zoned into academic writing and into fear I wanted somebody who would help me be able to write my thesis in a way that would be more readable by a general population so I think that also is like tone in who are the people that know your audience as well yeah when I came in I was very interested you know would just like talk to the professor especially in the first semester there are often a lot of events where it's like hey you need the faculty hang out with them chat and so I'd be like I want to write a thesis on this topic what do you think about it? how familiar they were how they approached it and then I picked out one or two professors that I might approach and then I actually had one of them or I said like this is what I need out of an advisor how do you do it and I mean you don't have to officially declare your advisor to a battle but you have some time and yeah I also straight up took my advisor like just please constantly reassure me about my thesis topic at the end of every meeting and it was great for my mental well-being would recommend you probably don't I don't exactly but basically he tried a lot of different things so how big are the research labs and are all the research people in the labs from CMS or are they from around MIT? it varies so some of the labs are very small it's Nick Mothler and one or two students they use an undergrad so we use it internships or whatever we heard from representative from the mobile training lab who said you know well we have CMS students but we also we have them all over the institute and the size you know I don't know if Andrew or Shannon could give us general like the size seems to be sort of two to maybe 15 how many people are there in the teaching system? so we have six full-time research staff and we have typically two master's students like one from San Jose and you have I think that's about the top of the delker and then the other side would be the design lab where there's many undergraduates many graduate students and then Nick Mothler's protein which is much much smaller yeah we've just seen it a little bit a lot of awesome old king systems in person with letter presses and stuff and you know some of them have open administrative assistants and some of them have to have no administrative assistants so it really varies any questions about the application process? I'm sure about like funding and like something like that what's helpful there is if you already know that you have funding and this tends to be I would say more from our international students who may have support from their government that will provide X amount of money for international research people who come in with that kind of support who would like to know we've got $10,000 from the Portuguese government towards websites you do not have to tell us the contents of it we don't want to we don't want to grant you to the most important thing for you to do is in the online application there is a box that asks if you are interested in financial aid please check yes because that is what makes you eligible for the research assistantship which provides full tuition plus a living status I'm sure good health insurance yes and for international students you do not have to submit the financial certification form until you are admitted that is a separate process that has to do with the F1 visa application and that doesn't have to happen until you've been admitted so just in the application check the box that says yes I'm interested it's apparently simple and you will be considered for research assistantship and I think somewhere that the funding is kind of tied to one of the labs and also another question do you all have a preference for a CV or a resume or both it doesn't matter whether you're formatted as a CV or more conventional resume I'll just say that sometimes resumes we have one page running back and obviously we want all of your experience but we don't care for pages one or five pages or 20 pages we just want to see your experiences, education background and use them to be properly formatted now other questions is that a good two hour run here we put in five minutes earlier alright well let me remind you that we have this colloquium in once again the room is 56114 56 is the building typing 114 that is from 5 to 630 that's with our four alumni on the panel why does it have to Q&A a little reception at the end so I hope that many of you listen now feel free to follow up if you have any questions I'll be in the middle of the room