Who are we?
This class is co-taught by Anish, Jon, and Jose. We are all ex-MIT students who started this MIT IAP class back when we were students. You can reach us collectively at missing-semester@mit.edu.
We are not paid to teach this class, and do not monetize the class in any way. We make all the course materials and recordings of the lectures freely available online. If you want to support our work, the best way to do so is to simply spread the word about the class. If you’re a company, university, or other organization that runs this content past larger cohorts, please send us experience reports/testimonials by email so we get to hear about it :)
Motivation
As computer scientists, we know that computers are great at aiding in repetitive tasks. However, far too often, we forget that this applies just as much to our use of the computer as it does to the computations we want our programs to perform. We have a vast range of tools available at our fingertips that enable us to be more productive and solve more complex problems when working on any computer-related problem. Yet many of us utilize only a small fraction of those tools; we only know enough magical incantations by rote to get by, and blindly copy-paste commands from the internet when we get stuck.
This class is an attempt to address this.
We want to teach you how to make the most of the tools you know, show you new tools to add to your toolbox, and hopefully instill in you some excitement for exploring (and perhaps building) more tools on your own. This is what we believe to be the missing semester from most Computer Science curricula.
Class structure
The not-for-credit class consists of nine 1-hour lectures, each one centering on a particular topic. The lectures are largely independent, though as the semester goes on we will presume that you are familiar with the content from the earlier lectures. We have lecture notes online, but there may be content covered in class (e.g. in the form of demos) that may not be in the notes. As for past years, we will be recording lectures and posting the recordings online.
We are trying to cover a lot of ground over the course of just a few 1-hour lectures, so the lectures are fairly dense. To allow you some time to get familiar with the content at your own pace, each lecture includes a set of exercises that guide you through the lecture’s key points. We will not be running dedicated office hours, but we encourage you to ask questions on the OSSU Discord, in #missing-semester-forum, or email us at missing-semester@mit.edu.