Northeastern Volunteer Systems Group “Crew” Works To Improve NU
March 14th, 2011
If you’re a Northeastern Husky and you’re interested in computer science, here’s one group you need to check out: the Crew team. But not the crew team you’re probably thinking of; this kind of Crew involves 100% less boat racing and 100% more research and development. Crew is the Volunteer Systems Group at the Northeastern College of Computer and Information Science, and although it is a group of students that meets weekly, it is not a registered student group. It is an extension of the CCIS Systems Group, and its mission is to improve the “computing environment in the College of Computer and Information Science at Northeastern University.” If you are a self-starter who wants to help out your community by using your tech skills, here’s your niche.
The beauty of Crew is that it combines the talents of students of all ages, and it gives them a place to come together to work with what they love: Computers. These students excel in their computer science classes, yet they join Crew in order to work on additional research. What’s really cool about Crew? The aim of all of their projects is to enhance life at Northeastern in some way. For instance, a few of the current experiments are a Google Map of West Village H, digital displays throughout the school, and an easy-to-use mobile MyNEU.
We had the pleasure of speaking with Roderic Morris, a senior member and one of the team leaders of Crew who told us, “Basically, we get together and work on projects we think will improve the computing environment in the computer science college. That involves researching new technologies and building software and sometimes hardware systems to show how they could be practically used. We’re not an official student group, so things are very dynamic. People just work on things that interest them. It’s a good way for everyone, especially the underclassmen, to learn outside of class.” You can check out their current, past, and future projects here at their website.
Crew even has its own Batcave called “the Pit,” or West Village H Room 314, that you can actually watch on camera here on the “Pitcam.” It is a place for students to make progress with their projects, and they work around the clock; Morris told us that a lot of Crew members are most productive late at night and early in the morning.
If you are interested in joining Crew and working on projects to improve Northeastern via technology, make sure to drop by one of their meetings. They meet every Thursday at 3 PM in the Pit, and anyone is welcome to attend. If you feel like you need to brush up on some information first, here’s the Crew handbook.
Why join Crew? Who could say it better than someone who’s spent a lot of time in it like Morris? He told us, “Being in Crew definitely helped me understand quickly what other people my age had a year and a half more than me to learn [because I had changed majors]. There’s also a sharing of different ideologies that takes place between people there. In Computer Science at least, people can be very opinionated and stick to some process or idea that works for them. There are a lot of ideas that you won’t be exposed to without taking part in some sort of community of programmers. Crew has been that sort of community for me. In the last year, I’ve also gotten experience as a leader. My main concern in that role has been facilitating other people’s learning. I’ve had the opportunity to see what helps or doesn’t help people to learn in this sort of context, and that’s been really valuable to me.”
Article by Elizabeth Bailey - BostInnovation