OPINION

Published Monday, March 15, 2004
Adventures in Cross-Registration
By Matt Crenshaw

Perusing the HGSE brochure for the first time, I got the impression I was watching a Ron Popeil infomercial. For all the possibilities the Ed School provided, there was the familiar hook…but wait, there’s more! Through the magic of cross-registration, HGSE students could take classes at any school throughout Harvard or at MIT. I was sold. If only tuition were three easy payments of $19.99.

In all honesty, cross-registration is what makes Harvard a magical place. Anyone can bash heads with people in their same field, duking it out over terminology and semantic differences. It’s easy to fight with your own family. What’s far more challenging is connecting what you know to a wider audience and plugging into a whole new set of values and concerns.

Let me tell you about my cross-registration experience. I’m sort of a de facto expert on the subject. In two semesters, aside from taking several Technology in Education (TIE) classes, I’ve enrolled at Harvard Medical School, the Kennedy School, MIT Sloan, the MIT Media Lab, and I’m keeping my eye on a late spring module at the Harvard Business School. Not to mention, I took part in a grueling four weeks called Winter Session at the Harvard School of Public Health.

Assuming you’re willing to cut through the red tape, you can cross-register. But is it worth it? For me, a student of TIE, I was already captivated by the notion that technology could be applied in a million different ways for educational benefit. I needed to go outside the educational field to see exactly what those were.

From day one I knew I wanted to take at least one course at the MIT Media Lab. I actually took two, one of them called Developmental Entrepreneurship. On day one, the professor walked in and laid out the agenda of the course in hair-raising simplicity: Find a persistent problem in a developing country. Solve it with technology.

My group featured two other people, one an MBA from Bangladesh, the other a policy expert from Ghana. We developed wireless platforms for the Costa Rican rainforest that taught me about environmental education, venture capital, and how to work with foreign governments. I may have failed at saving the world, but I learned plenty.

The MIT class got me thinking about worldwide healthcare problems and what educational technologies could do. For Chris Dede’s course, Juliet Fink and I paid a visit to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta to evaluate their online SARS programs. The nice people of the CDC answered our questions and then gave us special clearance to tour their Ebola laboratories. Afterward, we joined several of them at their local watering hole and got a real insider’s perspective on the field of public health.

While we were there, someone had asked if we were from the Harvard School of Public Health. I didn’t have the heart to say I had never heard of it. Instead, when I got back to Cambridge I looked it up. After searching their website, I found a Winter Session course on emerging technologies that sounded like a perfect extension of TIE.

Another student, Semira Rahemtulla, and I braved our share of frigid January mornings to catch the M2 shuttle down to Longwood Medical Area. On the first day we nearly talked ourselves out of it, but the class turned out to be a rare gem. There were only four students, a teaching assistant, and the professor. As Semira and I shared our thoughts on education, we found that their approach to health communications and behavioral change wasn’t far off. The class became a kind of breakfast club; we talked for hours and hours about blending education with healthcare. I thought I’d never be able to walk into a large seminar hall again.

One of the lessons of cross registering is to take risks. Enroll in classes that don’t make any sense just because they feel right. While I was in the public health course, the TA asked if I’d be interested in working on a project developing handheld nutritional devices for supermarket shoppers. It wasn’t education as I had ever thought of it, but I said sure, and it has put me in a group of engineers, MBAs, and public health students that I would have never worked with otherwise.

Everyone comes to HGSE looking for something unique. Some have a clear vision of what they want out of the nine months and where they expect to be when it’s over. I feel lucky that, in a sense, I was clueless when I got here. Instead of a straight line, my course path has been more like a zig-zag, allowing me to meet people from a wide range of fields. None of it was planned, but all of it has been worthwhile.

Matt Crenshaw is a student in the Technology in Education program.