STUDENT PROFILES
Darren Baker ’08
Concentration
Computer ScienceExtra Credit
Darren enjoys performing choral music and going camping and mountain biking.Quotable
"I want my engineering efforts to have an impact that extends beyond the realm of technical conferences and bona fide computer geeks."“Must be user error.” So goes the punch line of a favorite T-shirt of mine that is favored by my classmates in the computer science department at Harvard. As a student in a traditionally “geeky” discipline and as a student employee offering technical support to the Harvard community, I am often surrounded by individuals who use technology on a daily basis and who, at least on a general level, understand the engineering principles that make such technology work.
To students like us, modern technologies (particularly computers) are not a mystery; rather, they form a collection of tools that we can combine and manipulate to analyze data, automate mundane tasks, entertain ourselves, and perform a thousand other useful functions. When we want to add some new piece of functionality to the toolbox, we know where to start in developing such a tool; and when something goes wrong with one of our tools, we know where to look to fix the problem.
Within this world of tech-savvy people, it’s sometimes easy to forget that this easy command of technological tools is not a skill that is shared by everyone, or even by a majority of the population at Harvard. Scanning for viruses and configuring an email client may be second nature to the technically adept, but we sometimes forget that the methods for carrying out such common tasks as these may not be so obvious to the average computer user.
I often engage in playful banter with my roommates, who are students of government and history, about the failure of their chosen concentrations to teach them any practical or marketable skills. But behind the joking façade of these interactions lie real issues: I’m sometimes not sure whether to be amused or appalled when my roommates or other students have to ask for my help when they’re trying to download an email attachment.
As I interact with many students each day, I see a peculiar dichotomy of “haves” and “have-nots” arising, with tech-savvy people in the former category and those lacking technical understanding in the latter. It’s this split that gives rise to the T-shirt slogan that I mentioned earlier. As the T-shirt demonstrates, we in the “have” group of technologists have a tendency to view the members of the opposite group as the greatest impediment to the onward march of technology in academics and society. The most frustrating errors that we encounter don’t arise in the operating systems or applications that we use each day; rather, these “user errors” stem from the inability of our technically inept counterparts to employ our technological tools with the same adroitness that we display.
But in spite of the frustration that my technical cohorts and I often feel when dealing with less-than-adept computer users, I believe that the very existence of this “have” and “have-not” environment is one of the most subtle but valuable assets of the liberal arts environment in which we work at Harvard. The spectrum of technical know-how that exists within the Harvard community mirrors in many ways the composition of society at large, and though we self-proclaimed technical gurus in the engineering disciplines often like to think otherwise, it is arrogant and presumptive of us to hope or demand that all the world’s computer users become expert programmers or engineers before they are allowed to apply technology in their personal, academic, and commercial pursuits.
The experience of living on an engineering island in a sea of liberal arts disciplines has reminded me that the full potential of technology is only reached when a broad (and often non-technical) user base is able to understand and utilize all of the functionality provided by that technology. In other words, the state-of-the-art algorithms that I implement as a software engineer aren’t worth much if my program’s user interface is impenetrably obtuse.
I have a passion for engineering great software, but studying computer science in Harvard’s diverse academic setting has reminded me that my development skills are only as good as each user’s ability to take advantage of all the engineering that went into my program. It sounds cliché, but whether I end up working in industry or academia, I want my engineering efforts to have an impact that extends beyond the realm of technical conferences and bona fide computer geeks.
I want to be able to feel like I’m making a difference in the lives of ordinary people—yes, even my friends in the humanities—and my experience as an engineer at Harvard has helped me to expand my working paradigm to the point where I’m able to take the needs of that group into consideration as I dream about the next generation of innovation. After all, if Harvard computer scientists can make technology understandable and accessible to our library-dwelling colleagues in the vaunted history and government departments, what can’t we do?