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August 25, 2006 Vol. 77, no.
2F
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| BACK TO SCHOOL : EECS alum Feff Chen is back in campus for the new EECS five-year Bachelor's/Master Program. PHOTO PROVIDED BY JEFF CHEN
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EECS students pursue entrepreneurial interests in new master’s program
Jeff Chen (B.S.’05 EECS) has firm ideas about technology. “Just making technology for technology’s sake is nonsense, in my opinion,” he says. “Technology is a tool for you to make an impact. It’s impact on the world that matters.” Since January, Chen has been living his beliefs by running a startup. “I’m working on a product that has to do with enabling people to communicate with each other in physical networking venues, such as career fairs or conventions,” he reports.
But starting this week, Chen will be on campus to start school again. He’s enrolled in the new EECS Five-Year Bachelor’s/Master’s Program, which was first approved by EECS faculty in April 2005. The program is for professionally oriented undergraduates with entrepreneurial and industry interests and provides an alternative to EECS’s traditional research-oriented graduate programs. It’s open only to Berkeley EECS and computer science students from the College of Letters and Sciences and is interdisciplinary, immersing students in areas such as management of technology, entrepreneurship, service sciences, business, law, public policy, or traditional areas like physics, chemistry and biology. Instead of a master’s thesis, students produce an integrative project report.
EECS professor and CITRIS director Shankar Sastry is on the program’s steering committee. “We received feedback from students that they wanted to stay longer in order to get a broader, more integrated experience,” he explains, “which they couldn’t get with an EECS bachelor’s degree because of all the unit constraints. So what we did was essentially expand the undergraduate program with the goal of training our students to be leaders and entrepreneurs in industry.” The program has struck a chord. Eighty students applied for eight slots this fall.
Chen is one of those lucky eight. “My passion in life is to change the world by taking technology and giving it to people,” he says. “This program is attractive because you’re expected to make a difference with existing technology from the lab.”
For more information, go to www.eecs.berkeley.edu/FiveYearMS/
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