we're going to do it with computers

[alexr_rwx]

Talking with Mike today, I brought up some of my frustrations with the CS program here, wondering whether I should switch to Cognitive Science or something else.

In a lot of ways, cogsci sounds kind of like what I want to do, and as I understand it, the program here is quite good. Discussing with Mike today, though, we uncovered two objections to my switching over: (a) they only have so much funding, and probably won't admit many students in the near future, and (b) to be in the cogsci program, it's pretty important that you care about cognition.

He said, and this made me feel really good: he likes that my goal is building software, because that's what he's out to do now too. Questions of psychological plausibility are only so interesting. (and they are kind of interesting.) But we're not going to do machine translation with brains, we're going to do it with computers, and hopefully it'll be useful to people.

(the downside, of course: I may have to take some dumb CS distribution requirement courses, which I feel like I shouldn't have to take because, y'know, I've already got an MS in this, and it's senselessly difficult to get my classes from gatech to transfer here.)

Comments

[winterkoninkje.livejournal.com]

If you're thinking of jumping ship, it seems like Informatics or (possibly) Complex Systems might be a better fit for you than Cog Sci... FWIW.

[winterkoninkje.livejournal.com]

Also, like I was saying to Lindsey, it may be easier to try to get the courses waived rather than trying to get credit transfered. Many departments are finicky about credits, even when they're relaxed about whether you actually take the specific "required" courses. I'm sure there are some interesting systems, theory, etc courses which would teach you something not covered by the MS; try to talk them into letting you take those in lieu of the reqs.

[oniugnip.livejournal.com]

We discussed that too, actually! I think Informatics sounds a lot like me, but they're not doing much NLP over there.

I think Fil's work is really interesting, though.