College Counseling at St. Margaret's

This is the first guest blogger to post. Jeff is a star from the Class of 2008 who attends Colby College in Waterville, Maine. I asked Jeff to write about how he’s spending his summer.

Hi, I’m Jeff Carpenter. I graduated SMES last year (’08) and I’m a rising sophomore at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. This summer I chose to study at Stanford University. In this post I’m going to tell you about Stanford in general, what I’m doing at Stanford, and plans for my major.

Let me start off by telling you something that you already know: Stanford’s campus is gorgeous. I was especially taken aback because I’m used to the uniform Georgian architecture of Colby. Stanford’s buildings fit in perfectly with the sunny California atmosphere. The classrooms have big windows, the courtyards have beautiful flowers, and the washing machines are free! However, with such a large campus, having a bike is almost a necessity. At Stanford I feel a little bit more anonymous, which could be expected of a large research institution. In this respect, I’m glad I went to a small liberal arts school where the focus is on advancing the student, not the field.

My classes are Cognitive Psychology and The Psychology of Making Better Decisions. The latter, MBD as we call it, is taught by two funny and insightful grad students. I eat lunch with them every Wednesday afternoon during their “office hours,” which are held at the campus café. Silicon Valley, in addition to being a tech mecca, is also a cycling mecca. I recently got into cycling, and I spend weekday mornings riding around the rolling hills behind Stanford. One of my friends in MBD, Dave, is working on a custom master’s degree at NYU called Cognitive Engineering, which is sort of like ergonomics for your brain; a study of how people interact with products and how to better design them. This is very similar to what I want to do, so we hang out a lot and compare notes. I’ve also gotten a chance to explore the area, visiting places like the Googleplex, Facebook, and Apple.

My custom major, tentatively named Social Informatics, combines Psychology and Computer Science into the study of human-computer interaction. I usually explain it like this: the negligible little bits of code that make up a Facebook or Twitter page can have very real world social manifestations. The position of a button can mean the difference between a correspondence or not, affecting relationships between people and changing the course of lives. My focus is to see if we can make these tools more transparent; to take the emphasis off the software and put it back on the people. After college, I’m hoping to work for companies like Vimeo, Twitter, or 37 Signals.