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Bicoastal INI MS in Information Technology
 | Gen is a full-time student in INI's MSIT program, Software Management track. Born and raised in New York City, Gen has spent the last 5 years in Montreal, Tokyo, Texas and now currently lives in San Jose, California. His current courseload is two courses at CMU SV and an industry practicum with Bosch. |
Monday, October 11, 2010
Introducing Gen Kazama
Hi everyone!
My name is Gen Kazama and I am currently in my last semester as an MSIT-SM student. The bi-coastal program is something I am truly glad I took a part in. It is part of the Information Networking Institute (INI) program, which is based at the main campus in Pittsburgh. The bi-coastal program is structured so you take your first 2 semesters in Pittsburgh, and your last two semesters at CMU’s Silicon Valley campus. It is very unique in that you experience the many brilliant minds and rigorous coursework in CMU in Pittsburgh. Then, once you build a solid foundation, you experience the more high-level application development and entrepreneurship prevalent in the Silicon Valley.
What makes this even more exciting for me is that I’ve never experienced the West Coast lifestyle. I was born and raised in New York City (yes, the “real” city, not the suburbs), then I went to McGill University in Montreal for my undergraduate studies and during my undergraduate summers, I worked in Tokyo and Texas. Even Pittsburgh was a culture shock for me as I am used to extremely dense inner cities (in a funny aside, I wasn’t able to sleep my first night in Pittsburgh because it was too quiet).
The Silicon Valley was an even bigger culture shock as the valley is more like a gigantic, rolling suburb as opposed to a city. I live in Downtown San Jose, but I am convinced there were more people in my high school than in the downtown area. Though I’ve become accustomed to most of the things that initially shocked me (nobody jaywalks?!), one of the hardest things is my lack of a car/driving. Not having a car really limits what you can do. A lot of locations are inaccessible without a car (unless you can run for miles) and though public transportation exists, it is wildly inefficient.
However, I don’t run into this problem a lot. I live in a downtown area, so the necessities (supermarket, stores, restaurants) are within walking distance and there’s a train that comes every 30 minutes that takes me to school. Currently, I am taking 2 courses and a practicum. My practicum is with Bosch and we are doing a really interesting project using WIMAX and a car (more details in later entries). We meet once a week and this is one of aforementioned inaccessible locations (4 hours and 4 miles of walking, according to Google Maps), but thankfully one of our team members has a car so we were saved.
So to future students, make sure you get your Driver’s License before coming here!
posted by Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley @ 10:40 AM
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