When Cognition meets the Web 2.0

If it happens to me to doubt about studying Cognitive Science and how it relates with my current job/interest, I only need to read again this amazing post at Creative Passionate Users: The Twitter Curve. And after reading it, here I am, back on track!

Multitaskig, information anxiety and how to be an expert when we are in such an interruptions-full work-enviroment.

The Expert Mind at Scientific American.

...much of the chess master's advantage over the novice derives from the first few seconds of thought. This rapid, knowledge-guided perception, sometimes called apperception, can be seen in experts in other fields as well. Just as a master can recall all the moves in a game he has played, so can an accomplished musician often reconstruct the score to a sonata heard just once. And just as the chess master often finds the best move in a flash, an expert physician can sometimes make an accurate diagnosis within moments of laying eyes on a patient.

By the way: I'd been 12 years-old when Grondona, the President of the Argentina Football Association, said that Diego Maradona had the gift to foresee the game actions. "He is always one-second ahead of the game", he is quoted to said. A nice example of apperception.

Keyword: Brain Information Retrieval.

Getting insights

Today I had the opportunity to chat with Luciano Tourn. He is an Industrian Engineer from Argentina doing a MBA at MIT. I found him via his blog.

He will put me in touch with the person who does the admission interviews for MIT in Argentina.

TOEFL score: 216

I just got a call from Kaplan Institute saying that my TOEFL computer based score was 216.
The minimum at MIT is 233 and recommended +250.

Not bad though. I will have to study a bit :)

Can I afford studying at the MIT?

Good question! On their website they say these are the undegraduate cost per year:

Tuition and fees $33,600
Room and meals $9,950
Books and personal expenses $2,800
Total cost for MIT undergraduates $46,350

Great. How I am gonna pay it? They say:

Financial Aid for International Students

International students are eligible for financial aid. As with US citizens and permanent residents, we consider every student for admission without regard to his or her financial need. In other words, applying for financial aid will not hurt your chances of admission. We admit the students best matched for MIT, regardless of their financial situation.

What's more, MIT is committed to providing all admitted students, including international students, with a financial aid package that fully meets their demonstrated need. Greater than 80% of MIT international students receive financial aid in the form of grant/scholarship (the average grant for international students is over $30,000 per year), totaling more than $8 million annually disbursed to international students.

This means basically that I have good chances to cover almost the whole tuition fee with their Grant. The rest should not present a problem, I hope :)

Following advice from Donald Norman

I don't remember when it was the first time I heard or read about Don. Probably before going to the User Experience Week in Amsterdam 2004. It is nice story.

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 :)

How is my English level: TOEFL for the first time

Yeah, I know. I could not wait. Today I decided to test my English level right away. I went to Enforex (representants of the Kaplan Institute) and did the 3-hours long exam, computer based.

It was not hard. Unfortunately, in the middle of the Reading part, an old women started cell-phoning very loud outside my classroom. I had to interrupt my test to tell her to shut up :) You can imagine how difficult it was to concentrate again after that.

Even though I wll know the final note by tomorrow, I do have the preliminary results:

Section Right Wrong
Listening 42 7
Structure 20 5
Reafing 51 9

They will analyse the Writing section and let me know the final score by tomorrow. I need more than 100 points to study anywhere.

I can't complain. It is the first time that I do the TOEFL practice and I had not much idea about it. I must say, though, that it is very similar to the German exams I did: DSH and TestDAF.

The where and the how

I wrote before that the first choice to come up in my mind to study Cognitive Science is the Massachuset Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Boston. Well the fact is that I live in Spain and even though I am not really attached to Madrid, moving to the US for a undergrad degree is not an easy choice. Moreover getting admitted at MIT is not the easiest thing neither.

Whichever Colllege I eventually choose and if it happes to be in the US, there are at leat 3 important steps I got to complete:

1. TOEFL
My English level is not bad and I need at least 100 points for the internet based exam. My idea is to pass this test during 2007.

2. SAT Math Level I and SAT Subject Biology.
This may be a bit more difficult. The goal wold be to do the exams in April 2008.

3. Letters of Recommendation
I am not sure how many I need, but I will definitly need a list of people who may do this for me.

There many other Universities in the US. I just need to research and be aware of the different orientations and who are the Profs.

Another possibility would be Germany. The University of Osnabrück seems to have a nice International Program. But again Germany? Not sure about that! I lived for almost 4 years in Frankfurt and it was enough, believe me! :)