I was working for a German company in Frankfurt and I was very interested on usability and user experience. I found out that the Nielsen Norman Group was going to be holding its well-known conference in Amsterdam. The price? Around 5.000€ for a week. Impossible. Say it again. Impossible? No way. I had to go.
Eventually I ended up emailing the organization offering myself to be a volunteer. They replied and put me in contact with the Dutch team. Thanksfully they said yes. I asked my boss for permission and stayed at friends during the week. Total cost: 200€ for the train ticket :)
My job was helping with the organization and selling books and t-shirts during the coffee-breaks. Not a hard task, though. In exchange I went to all the workshops I wanted with really cool people. Eventually I made friendship with Roberto, a colombian guy living in the Netherlands. He was a bit more aggresive than me: he went the very same day to the conference with 500€ saying "this is all I have, please let me in". He ended up selling books with me, hehe.
I can't explain how much I learned during the 6 days. Besides meeting in person Jakob Nielsen, Peter Morville, Bruce Tognazzini and many other gurús... I had the huge pleasure to see Don Norman. Wanna know who is he? He writes of himself:
I have a background in both engineering and the social sciences, with both academic and industrial experience. I've been an executive in several companies. In addition to my consulting, I'm Professor of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, Psychology, and Cognitive Science at Northwestern University. I'm also Professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego (in Cognitive Science and Psychology). I teach at Northwestern University in the Fall and Spring. (Northwestern is in Evanston, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago: I live in Chicago during the Fall and Spring and in Palo Alto, California during the Winter and Summer.)
As co-founder and principal of the Nielsen Norman group, I'm happily engaged in advising numerous companies on products and services for consumers. I was Vice President of the Advanced Technology Group at Apple Computer, and an executive at Hewlett Packard and UNext (Cardean University), a distance education company.
And here comes the reason of this post. Yesterday I emailed Don:
Dear Don,
I had the pleasure to be part of the User Experience Week 2004 in Amsterdam :)
Yes, I was one of the guys selling the books and N/N Group t-shirts during the coffee-breaks. Now I am a SEO consultant in Spain :)
I am willing to study Cognitive Science in the US and was wondering if you can give me some insights about the universities.
This is my own ranking:
1-MIT
2-Northwestern
3-??
4-??
5-??
My interest focus is cognition related to information behaviour and wayfinding (findability).
I'd love if you can help me out to decide where to appy.
Thanks a lot Don.
One would think normally that heavy-busy and importat people like Don would not reply, right? Wrong. He answered me today:
Tomy
If you are interested in wayfinding, etc., (I'm not sure if you mean information behavior to be a separate topic or a modification of wayfinding. IF a separate topic, it is too broad to be meaningful. if a part of wayfinding, why restrict the solutions? That is following the old path -- you should be placing new ones.)
If those are your interests, do not chose a school: chose a person. Do research on who is doing the work you enjoy working. Write to them. Apply to work with them.
graduate school is a mentorship. You work with the person. The department is of secondary importance. The university of of tertiary importance.
Start looking at the work of Barbara Tversky. Go from there.
(I would not have put either MIT or Northwestern on my list of places for these this topic)
OK? Find people writing about the stuff you care about.
By the way, find articles they are writing today. Don;t find someone who is in the text books. Those will be works done 10 years ago, and the person may no longer be doing that stuff. So if you find a person in a textbook, search to see what they re doing now.
because of Google scholar and search.live.com (Academic search) it is easy to find people
Don Norman
Even though his advice is pretty smart and I think it may be a good approach, the problem is that I am not seeking a graduate degreee, but undergrad instead.
undergrad degree? Oh.
Then the choice of university is very important. And your interests not very relevant because they will change.
MIT is now a very good choice. UC san Diego. CMU. a lot of places.
see
http://www.cognitivesciencesociety.org/graduate/
these are graduate schools, but the same places will also have good undergrad departments.
good luck
don
I will look for more pieces of advice from other people I know. But it is certainly not a bad start :)
No comments:
Post a Comment