Building a new kind of Master’s degree
This article is a long time coming. I have been asked by everyone from departments on my own campus to my family members to colleagues at other universities to describe the process, work, and joys of creating a new program. It’s high time I let you behind the curtain.
So first, a quick history and timeline…
UCI has been a leader in Human Computer Interaction as a research field since it was founded and long before I came to campus. We have more CHI academy members than almost any other department. When I arrived, we had a MS degree in Information and Computer Sciences, through which you could specialize in Informatics and further specialize in Information and Communications Technologies, Ubiquitous Computing, and so on. This was as close as we got to a Master’s level degree in HCI, and as a brand new assistant professor, that seemed just fine to me.
Over the years, I heard constant murmurings about the need to create a more professionally oriented degree. It wasn’t that our MS students weren’t going into industry after graduation, but we found we were probably better preparing them for a life of research and a PhD as the next step in their careers. I must admit, at this point, I should have really started paying attention. Friends at CMU, Georgia Tech, Michigan, and beyond were worried that they had so many applicants for so few spots. Jobs requiring advanced HCI degrees were going unfilled by the thousands and UX was increasingly a “hot” employment area. Meanwhile, we were trying to shoehorn professional students into our research graduate programs. I should have paid this all more attention, but as happens so often, life gets in the way, and you don’t notice something until it is really in your face. I credit my awakening in large part to two very different students: Boaz Gurdin and Meg Cramer. Both were my graduate students around the same time, though Boaz knew from the beginning he wanted to go to industry and Meg briefly thought she wanted to be a researcher. Both are excellent user experience professionals who have great careers after graduating UCI, and I am proud to have advised them. They also both really helped me to see the holes in our curriculum for a professionally oriented student.
And so, post-tenure with little excuse for continuing to bury my head in the sand, I responded to some gentle prods from my department chair and got started on creating a new Master’s program here at UCI, one built from the ground up with professionals in mind. I benefited greatly in the summer of 2014 from the brain trust that is Judy Olson and Don Patterson. Hours spent in a small conference room resulted in lists like “essential skills and knowledge” or “potential courses and instructors” and my favorite “ideal advisory board members” (spoiler alert: everyone from our ideal list said yes and now serves in that role). This part of the process was probably the most fun I have had in academia yet. We were benefiting from two decades of experience at other universities (who were very generous in telling us what worked and what didn’t over the years) as well as hours of interviews and discussions with talent acquisition specialists, hiring managers, and our alumni.
What did we learn?
Lots of schools are already doing a great job teaching advanced HCI, and yet none of them were filling a major gap we saw: professional students who want to keep working, don’t want to move, and want more than a certificate program. We also knew from all our interactions with people in the field that UX is becoming more and more distributed. Students need to know how to work and collaborate at a distance. Lucky for us, we have two of the world’s experts in distance collaboration here at UCI (Judy and Gary Olson) as well as the MacArthur hub for digital media and learning, run by Mimi Ito, one of the word’s experts in technology augmented learning. Here was a major opportunity. As people later told me (and told me and told me and told me), if anyone can figure out how to do and teach HCI and design at a distance, its UCI.
And so we did. We figured out how to do and teach user experience, HCI, and design at a distance.
We developed an innovative curriculum that one of our advisory board members called “the most exciting thing happening in HCI education.” Our format is low-residency, meaning students come to campus for short intensive periods (and they are INTENSE, just ask the students), and in between they work online with faculty, TAs, and each other. The students finish in just over a year, which is about all anyone can do at the pace they are working. The curriculum includes traditional HCI coursework as well as units on project management, organizational behavior and change management, and innovations in the field. The program culminates with a capstone project with external clients.
The accreditation process was lengthy and often challenging, requiring many rounds of discussion and reviews, but our program came out stronger and better than it would without that labor, it also took a few years off my life.
With our newly minted approvals and accreditation in hand, Spring 2016 led us to the fire drill that is attempting to advertise, admit, and enroll our first cohort in just a couple of months. This was the scariest part of the process for me. Sure, we had a fun time launching the program at an epic party at CHI in San Jose, but we were also all left wondering, “we built it, will they come?” By this time, Judy, Don, and I had sunk years into our original curriculum development. We had hired a new lecturer to join us, Darren Denenberg, who moved from Las Vegas on the promise that this was all a go. Bill Tomlinson, Melissa Mazmanian, Jesse Colin Jackson, and Blake DiCosola had all prepped coursework. And now, we waited…
At this point, I was checking the application tracker daily. We hit ten applications “phew, we can have a class” and then twenty “we can actually be selective with our class”, and then more and more, and suddenly, it was “this might actually work!” Nearly everyone we admitted came. This was a first for me. And then in September, I got to meet them. Twenty-two of the BEST students I have ever had the privilege to teach. I’m not biased I swear…
They are now half way through the program. I can hardly believe they will be looking for jobs soon, and it breaks my heart to know they won’t be hitting me up on Slack, Facebook, Twitter, and everywhere else a year from now as their lives take on new adventures. I am so grateful to the many people who made this program happen, most of whom are not even named in this post. Launching a new program is a lot like parenting, the hardest, best, most infuriating and most rewarding thing I could have done the last few years.
But enough about me, over the next weeks and months of this publication, you will have the pleasure of hearing directly from them. Read on and enjoy!
