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 the Web to file sharing, all at the blazing 1.25 megabytes per second of Ethernet, the Internet is a central part of the Yale experience.

SHAWN CHENG/YH

The educational role of the network starts with picking classes. The Yale College Programs of Study (the Blue Book) is online, and it can be searched by various criteria thanks to a search engine from Information and Technology Services (ITS). Links from the search tool to course webpages and online syllabi help make shopping period less painful. And, starting this year, ITS will be testing out online registration for courses.

But this is just the beginning of the relationship between coursework and the network. More and more professors are creating webpages—usually on classes.yale.edu, the official course webpage server—containing assignments, reference materials, homework solutions, sample tests, and links to additional information. Some language courses have sound clips online, eliminating the grueling hike from Old Campus to the language lab in Rosenfeld Hall. And most art history classes now have slides available online, ending treks to Street Hall for photo study. In other classes, discussions take place in Internet newsgroups, professors respond to questions via e-mail, and TAs send e-mails with class information or entertaining asides.

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. The Pantheon, Yale's student account server, offers development tools for programmers as well as Webster, an online dictionary.

Even paper writing has been revolutionized by the Internet. Yale computers have access to Britannica Online, Lexis-Nexis, Jstor, medical databases, 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 Research Workstation page, which also links to various other catalogs, including ORBIS, Yale's internal catalog.

The ability to transfer files comes in handy, too. Teachers sometimes accept papers as e-mail attachments. When documents have to be shared by students for collective editing or studying, e-mail is often preferable to a visit to the copier.

A few weeks after classes end (in typical Yale fashion, grades are still manually entered), grades are available on the Student Information System (SIS) website. The SIS site also lets students look at financial information and modify mailing addresses.

The Internet is already ubiquitous at Yale. Apart from almost all students owning their own computers, there are clusters in every college, kiosks at the dining halls, and experiments are being conducted with wireless Internet access in public areas. Computers even play a part in the Yale social scene: there are instant messages to the guys next door, trading MP3s across the network neighborhood, and e-mails announcing meetings and events. DSers hang out in Connecticut Hall, the computer cluster on Old Campus, to finish their papers on Thursday nights. Computer science students have raging parties at their lab in Watson, called the Zoo because all the computers have animal names. Engineers hang out at the Garage in Dunham, and artists have the new Digital Media Center for the Arts. Facebooks, the heart and soul of Yale's awkward social scene, were put online last year.

Sadly, Yale was ranked 38th in Yahoo! Internet Life's 1999 listing of the nation's most wired colleges. (Yale opted not to participate in the 2000 edition of the survey.) As popular as computers are here, there is still an affinity for paper among many professors and administrators. Even with digital projection technology, chalkboards and overheads win out over PowerPoint.

But despite certain problems, the relationship between Yale and computers is strong. Yale is home to the Center for Advanced Instructional Media, which produces a renowned webpage style guide. Yale also helped found the Internet precursor BitNet. The creator of the hacking tool AOL4Free was a Yalie. And now many students at Yale are involved in various start-up technology companies, perhaps having recognized in their own campus life just how revolutionary the Internet can be.

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