While Prof. Shwartz’s talk has no real utility for me, I did find it interesting as a member of the larger Cornell community.  I’ll never end up at (or even look at) Cornell Tech because it lies so far off of my career trajectory.  That said, hearing about the model of education being employed at Cornell Tech on the whole and the Jacobs Institute in particular is interesting from a pedagogical perspective.  I really like the model that they’ve implemented in their masters programs–as far as I can tell, they’ve synthesized the skill set usually gained by years in industry and turned it into a curriculum, essentially allowing you to buy job experience (this is absolutely an oversimplification, but I think a decently apt way of looking at it).  Having programs like this should change the way that people access high-level positions that lie at the intersection of multiple fields in the same industry.