I hate feeling like I don’t belong. Like that one time in swimming lessons when I was 8, and I was “promoted” to the advanced class, where I was required to hold my breath under water for a minute as a warm up exercise. Excuse me?! “I think I’d like to go back to the Beginner class,” I said, and I was off dog paddling to the other end of the pool.

I’m getting a similar feeling in my Software Engineering class this semester. The class is called “Methods: Deciding What To Design” – which sounds relevant to HCI (and actually, it is). But all this excitement doesn’t negate the fact that it is, in fact, a Software Engineering class. So when someone asks a question for clarification, and the professor says, “You can think of this like a Heap Sorting algorithm,” and everyone in the class is suddenly enlightened (except for the lone HCI student in the room, who has undergone a comprehension loss), it’s easy to feel like you don’t belong.

In truth, I’m not too worried about the analogies per sé. I can understand the textbooks pretty well (except for Problem Frames by Michael Jackson… no relation to the singer guy… but more on this later). My concern is how an MSE student, who relies on analogies like “Hey, this semi-tricky concept can be compared to a complex sorting algorithm” is going to turn around and explain this semi-tricky concept to his/her non-technical supervisors when he/she is managing a group of software developers. My eyes glazed over at the heap sort explanation, and I have a Computer Science degree.

It’s a bit of a conundrum. The point of an analogy is to get the confused party to better understand the material, so I suppose the professor was right on target in using it. But at the same time, I think this calls to light the rift between technically-oriented people and those who aren’t. But then, I guess that’s why HCI is great – all the technical knowledge with a healthy dose of design and psychology to ground the knowledge. I knew I made the right decision.