A computer geek's guide to networking at Yale

The Internet. You've heard of it; odds are you've even used it. But you haven't lived it until you get here. From e-mail to webpages to file sharing, all at the blazing 1.25 megabytes per second of Ethernet, the Internet is a pervasive part of the Yale experience.

SHAWN CHENG/YH

Computers even play a part in the Yale social scene: Instant Messages (IMs) and ICQs (an instant chat program) to the guys next door, e-mails announcing meetings and events, and Quake games on the intranet. But as entertaining as computers are in that context, they are even more essential when it comes to academics.

The educational role of the network starts with picking classes. Yale College Programs of Study (the Blue Book) is online, as is the supplement listing where classes meet. Searching for classes based on particular criteria electronically is often far more efficient than paging through the paper version. During shopping period, the Internet also comes in handy by providing syllabi and webpages for some courses, which give you some idea of what's in store before you step into the lecture hall or classroom.

But this is just the beginning of a beautiful relationship between coursework and the network. More and more professors are creating webpages with assignments, reference materials, homework solutions, sample tests, and links to additional information. Yale recently created classes.yale.edu in an effort to consolidate course webpages. Some language courses have sound clips online—saving students the grueling hike from Old Campus to the language lab in Rosenfeld Hall—and some history of art classes have their slides digitized, saving students a trip to photo study. Discussions take place in Internet newsgroups, professors respond to questions via e-mail, and TAs send e-mails with class information or entertaining asides. Once you've completed a course, your final scores may be e-mailed to you or accessible online. A few weeks later, grades are available on the Student Information System website.

The fun doesn't stop there. A resourceful student can find information on his own to supplement inadequate lecture attendance or insufficient reading. Directed Studies (DS) students have a web page providing homemade Cliff's Notes for all DS books.

The ability to transfer files comes in handy, too. Teachers sometimes accept papers as e-mail attachments, and students zip files to their buddies for proofreading or printing. When documents have to be shared for collective editing or studying, the electronic transmission option is often preferable to a visit to the copier.

Those little glowing screens are also key when it comes to research. Yale computers have access to Britannica Online, Lexis-Nexis, and a host of other online information sources. Lexis-Nexis is a researcher's best friend, offering archives from various major publications. It can be found on the library's page, which also links to various other catalogs, including ORBIS, Yale's internal catalog.

The network also provides software to help with homework. Not only are there a variety of programs in the computer labs, students can also obtain time-limited versions of programs like Mathematica. Pantheon, Yale's student account server, offers development tools for programmers as well as Webster, an online dictionary.

Computers can even bring people together. DSers hang out in Connecticut Hall, the computer cluster on Old Campus, to finish their papers on Thursday nights. They also send deranged messages out over the Directed Studies e-mail list. Computer science students have raging parties at their lab in Watson, called the Zoo because all of the computers have animal names (the Connecticut Hall computers are named after Simpsons characters). Engineers hang out at the Garage in Dunham, and artists have the new Digital Media Center for the Arts.

Sadly, Yale was ranked 38th in Yahoo! Internet Life's 1999 listing of the nation's most wired colleges. As popular as computers are here, there is still an affinity for paper in many sectors, including course registration and class lectures. Even with digital projection technology, chalkboards and overheads win out over PowerPoint.

Despite certain problems, the relationship between Yale and computers is good. Yale is home to the Center for Advanced Instructional Media, which produces a world-renowned webpage style guide. Yale also helped found the Internet precursor BitNet. The creator of the hacking tool AOL4Free was a Yalie. And the future looks bright.

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