For me it was at a big house in a wealthy suburb, and we talked one on one in the living room. There was no real guidance or explanation other than here is the time and place.
From what I could remember, the alumni interviewer was kind, I just couldn't articulate answers to his questions as I was unprepared and didn't know what to expect. With some insight on the process, I probably could have done better, but it doesn't really matter.
I ended up on a different path and am content with where it lead.
My larger point is that there are many little ways where legacy advantages can leak through even if you have an explicit policy of not considering it.
I think alumni interviews are such a possible mechanism of still factoring in legacy status or making this advantages stand out without it being on the application.
To me, using alumni to do interviews is just a form of indirection in regards to legacy admissions.
Who is better prepared to discuss MIT with alumni? A student with no idea about college or admissions, or someone who grew up with experience and knowledge of the institution.
The push back against legacy is that is gives an advantage and thus less meritocratic. In this interview situation, a legacy is still at an advantage, and from my experience, a significant one.
Again, I'm not sure this practice is still a part of the admissions process. My point is that non legacy were at a disadvantage when they had alumni interviews.
Maybe this is true now, but when I applied to MIT for undergrad in 2002, I had to meet with an alumnus at their house near me for an interview. Being from California and first generation American and the first of my family to go away for college, I had no idea how admissions worked nor did I know much about MIT. Because of that, I basically bombed that interview as I was unprepared (didn't know what to expect and didn't have the cultural knowledge to converse properly). I was subsequently rejected from MIT despite having pristine credentials for the time (however, I was accepted at other schools such as Berkeley, UCLA, Stanford, and my eventual choice Notre Dame).
Moreover, a classmate of mine from a wealthier family and who was on the football team was admitted to MIT, despite having worse grades and a lower SAT score (he was smart and deserving, I'm just pointing out that my numbers were better).
So while it is nice that MIT claims to not use legacy now, the process I experienced 20 years ago suggests that alumni still had influence then and even athletics mattered too.
To be clear, I'm not necessarily against legacy admissions or athletic preferences. I just wish schools were upfront about it and things were explained clearly to applicants.
University of Notre Dame | South Bend, IN | ONSITE | Assistant Professor of the Practice - Video Game Development
The Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Notre Dame invites applications for a non-tenured instructor of Video Game Development at the Assistant Professor of the Practice rank. The department is especially interested in candidates who are well-versed in technical game development and have a specialization in programming video game engines or graphics, optimizing software performance, and building complex and scalable applications.
The primary responsibility for this position is to develop and teach a new two course video game development sequence, focusing on the technical aspects of developing video games across a variety of platforms (PC, mobile, console, AR/VR, etc.). Additionally, this position will also have the opportunity to develop complementary electives in the areas of computer graphics, software optimization, scalable or high performance applications, and other topics related to video game development.
> IRC cloud is paid with a monthly subscription right?
That is correct, although there is a free tier, which my wife used for a while. The only major downside to the free tier is that IRC Cloud disconnects after two hours of idle activity.
> Are you using weechat as a relay for the Android client or is it a standalone irc client? Cause to receive notifications a websocket will still have to be always connected.
The former. I have a weechat instance (it is a terminal IRC client) on a VPS (the same one also running my wife's instance of thelounge) that I normally use when I'm on my laptop. On my phone, I use Weechat-Android as a relay client to the weechat instance. So the websocket connection on my phone talks to my weechat relay. Fortunately, Weechat-Android handles connecting and disconnecting seemlessly, and I don't have a problem with notifications.
My wife uses thelounge (self-hosted instance) as a progressive web application on her Android phone. It supports push notifications and file uploads. Before this, she used IRC Cloud, which also has a convenient mobile application with those features.
As for myself, I use Weechat-Android (for about 6 years now) and am very happy with that on my Android phone. It uses a websocket with SSL, so I get notifications and it uses very little battery (or data).
From my experience, the main reason for the low number of CS majors is simple: most students don't know what Computer Science is. At the university where I teach, half of the CS majors arrived on campus not knowing they would major in Computer Science simply because they didn't know what CS was. Only after taking a first year engineering sequence where they sample different aspects of multiple engineering disciplines do many of these students realize CS is an attractive and interesting field to study.
Moreover, I have taught a variety of introductory to computing courses to non-CS majors (ie. humanities and business) and what I've found is that a number of students (particularly women) really enjoy the computing classes and say they wish they had majored or minored in CS, but they didn't know what it was until they took the class. A few actually do switch into a computing related major afterwards, though not necessarily CS.
This may seem counter-intuitive, but while many people know how to use computers and technology, many people don't actually understand how it works. Because of this, Computer Science is a mystery to most people and so they don't consider it. This is in part why I am excited about the CS4All movement at the K-12 level... simply exposing Computer Science or computational thinking will go a long way in attracting more people to the major.
Alternatively, another reason why you don't necessarily see a growth in CS majors is because programming is not restricted to Computer Science. Most science and engineering disciplines involve programming now and many curriculums will have programming courses. This is even true in humanities (ie. digital humanities) and business (ie. data analytics) where coding is becoming a desirable skill. If you had a deep interest in say economics and needed to develop some programming skills to simulate models or evaluate data, you can gain these skills and knowledge outside of the CS major and I think that is a good thing.
With this in mind, I think a lot of CS departments will need to consider the shift from being a "destination" major to a "service" major where a significant portion of the teaching load is to non-CS majors who want a minimal core, but not all of CS. A flat growth in CS majors does not necessarily mean a lack of computing or programming education in general.
Finally, I would say that in my department, we have seen record growth in the past few years (from 50 a few years ago to 150) and that is caused a number of problems. This is not restricted to our university as noted in "Generation CS" from CRA:
A new language isn't required. For part of my dissertation, I wrote a DSL on top of Python called Weaver (http://bitbucket.org/pbui/weaver) that compiles workflow DAGs that are executed by Makeflow (http://cse.nd.edu/~ccl/software/makeflow) on a variety of distributed systems (e.g. Condor, SGE, WorkQueue, multi-core).
I also uploaded my PhD dissertation from 2012 and got back 40% machine, which is just barely below the 42% threshold.
I don't publish anymore... but does this mean I wrote like a LLM or did LLMs learn from me? :p
Update: I also uploaded a IEEE CLUSTERS paper I wrote in 2015 and it came back 74% machine written :|