Last week I got the opportunity to listen to Professor Shwartz’s presentation about the Jacobs Institute at Cornell Tech. Although my career goals aren’t really in the tech field, I found the Jacobs Institute’s teaching style to be very interesting. I think personal interaction between instructors and students is the single most important aspect of learning, and it’s hard to have one-on-one interactions like this when hundreds of other students are trying to do the same. I found it particularly noteworthy how the professors sometimes do their work in the same room as the students, so they can be approached easily if a student needs help. I really like this model of teaching and I think the Jacobs Institute should try to keep their future student admissions at a minimum in order to facilitate this.

I also found the idea of combining business and technology interesting; I’ve always thought of them as separate entities, with engineers creating technology and businessmen advertising and selling it. It seems really efficient to have knowledge in both of these aspects, and I think more tech graduate schools should adopt this approach and offer a few mandatory business classes.