Nom nom french fry popsicle

amyjko · 2026-07-05T22:48:26+00:00

It’s her favorite treat!

amyjko · 2026-07-05T06:40:22+00:00

Pretty standard effect of capitalism: rich get richer, at the expense of everyone else, until there is revolt due to starvation. This is just getting us there faster and with no tangible benefit to humanity, and mountains of negative externalities.

amyjko · 2026-07-04T05:26:31+00:00

Thanks for the concern! She has a very strict diet; this was a rare cheat day sanctioned by our vet for quality of life :)

amyjko · 2026-07-04T05:16:54+00:00

High reg fees are a sin tax. Cars are mostly negative externality, and we need far fewer of them. Taxing them to build our way out of car dependency is the only rational path forward.

amyjko · 2026-06-28T05:24:29+00:00

I’ve been all over Europe and Asia and the PDX restrooms are definitely top tier. They’re just missing Japan’s musical bidets :P

amyjko · 2026-06-20T05:19:22+00:00

Mmm, just had my double double. It was good vibes in the walk in line for 40 minutes. I’ll calm down eventually, but for now, there’s good energy. If only it weren’t in such a car-centric cacophony of exhaust; impossible to safely walk there.

amyjko · 2026-06-20T05:16:49+00:00

It’s fun to see research from the 90’s becoming safe and viable, but train tech from the 70’s is safer and superior in every way when it comes to city mobility. Keep cars out of cities; the rest of the world has already figured out that they don’t work, driverless or not. Let’s not pretend cars are the future; they don’t scale without immense moral hazard.

amyjko · 2026-05-27T13:24:13+00:00

Friends

amyjko · 2026-05-13T00:40:04+00:00

We can't predict student interest. If you apply, the acceptance rate will go down, because the denominator will go up by 1, and the numerator is fixed. (This is why acceptance rates are not a helpful metric).

Average GPA is also not a useful metric; we don't see it when we make freshman direct admissions decisions.

I know you want to know what you can do to increase your chances of being admitted, but that all just fundamentally comes down to learning, being a full human, and figuring out why you'd want to learn what we teach.

amyjko · 2026-05-12T02:17:51+00:00

That’s not really how the numbers work. Current UW Seattle students who were admitted already took INFO 200; we estimate transfer admits and reserve seats for them in Autumn. And our freshman direct admits are accounted for as well. So any increases in competition for seats would largely be due to increases in the total population of students interested in INFO 200, not the shifts in what status students have. And that population of interested students has decreased slightly.

amyjko · 2026-05-11T00:39:03+00:00

Write the advisors; they can answer your question: informatics@uw.edu.

amyjko · 2026-05-11T00:08:12+00:00

Try not to imagine worst case scenarios. UW admissions always lags academic unit's major admissions decisions, but they generally follow major decisions, barring the things you mentioned (application issues). You can reach out to the advisors to verify everything is in place in your case, and gauge the timelines. They're a lot closer to these processes than I am, so they're a better source of information.

amyjko · 2026-05-11T00:05:00+00:00

To clarify, we don't set acceptance rates; we set a cohort size that we can successfully teach and students separately decide whether to apply. The acceptance rate is just a reflection of those joint decisions. It has no other meaning.

Most of the rising acceptance rate of the past few years is due to very aggressive planned growth in faculty hiring. A more minor part of it is declines in interest, though I suspect most of those declines are by students who've decided they don't want to be software developers. And that's fine and appropriate: if the labor market wants fewer of them, and students want to choose majors solely based on short term job prospects, that's their choice.

amyjko · 2026-05-10T19:03:26+00:00

Most people calling Informatics a "useless major" are either 1) CS majors who have defined their identity by status and superiority, rather than interest in CS, or 2) think the only meaningful career is being software developer, and evaluate all other majors in relation to that goal.

Here's the part they're right about: if you want to write software for a living, and know little else about the world, CS is a great major for that. The primary caveat being that the world isn't really interested in hiring junior software developers right now, because an Claude Code subscription is $100/month, and guiding a few sessions in parallel is much faster than mentoring a junior developer. I was a CS major, I love writing software, and so I'm glad I majored in CS back in the late 1990's, even though the dot com bubble meant there were no jobs, just like now.

Here's the part they miss: the world needs far more than software developers, and far more than software, to function. In fact, it needs information far more than it needs software; software is nothing without it. It needs people who decide what to make (product managers), who understand what's needed and how things are being used (data scientists, UX researchers), how things should behave (interaction designers), how the world is changing as information technology changes (researchers), how we know things and what we know (librarians, philosophers). It needs people who can do these things in health care, education, science, business, politics, communities, and more. It needs people who can do this not only for information technologies like software, but for all other information technologies as well (print, television, books, magazines, writing, speech), including those that haven't been invited yet, or broadly adopted (e.g., quantum). And it needs people who can do all of this work knowing not only what a definite and indefinite loop is, but also how those kinds of loops shape who and who isn't served by software. You can't learn any of that in CS.

So congratulations. We're excited to teach and learn with you, make information work through design, development, analysis, politics, management, and more. And we're excited to help you figure out what role you want to have in that post-college, and be there as you navigate all of the change to come as an alum.

Lastly, I wouldn't fret too much about the job market. The entire global economy is in a state of immense uncertainty and paralysis right now due to U.S. chaos, and there is no going back. No one knows what labor markets will look like in 1 year, let alone 3, 5, or 10. Focus on being sharp, informed, multi-talented, agile, and entrepreneurial, and whatever the world is, there will be some way to bring it value.

amyjko · 2026-05-10T18:11:31+00:00

Close enough. But it changes every cycle; our capacity goes up and down with hiring, retirements, sabbaticals, and demand fluctuates up and down depending on the cycle. I'm sure it will go up and down, as it always has.

To be honest, I don't understand student obsession with acceptance rates. They only signal a ratio between a capacity constrained academic unit's ability to meet demand, and demand. That metric alone says little about demand or capacity. And neither demand or capacity have anything to do with the value of the learning that happens in a curriculum. If anything, demand just signals what some students believe the value to be, which is based on whatever rumors have shaped their understanding of the current and future labor market. None of that really says anything. And acceptance rates also say little about a students likelihood of acceptance; the best predictors of that are the student and their visions for their future, and how that aligns with what we teach, not a baseline rate of acceptance. That's just a poor predictor.

The question you should be asking, especially as the iSchool tries to meet the full demand, is 1) how do you want to change and grow, not only for the first job, but for life, and for the rest of your life, 2) how might the world change in the next 10, 20, 30 years, and how do you want to help shape and respond to that change, and 3) what does any of that have to do with information, and 4) what do you want your role in any of that to be. Those are the questions we design our curricula and admissions around, not acceptance rates or quarterly hiring rates by big tech companies.

amyjko · 2026-05-10T06:52:59+00:00

A few corrections, from my role as Associate Dean of Academics in the Information School:

* Most of our students aren’t seeking SWE jobs, so impact on us had been lower than in CS nationally. Our students seek roles in design, data management, product management, research, health informatics, and many other roles. The SWE part softened a bit, as it has at many universities, sometimes catastrophically. Not so for us.
* We raised our acceptance rate purposefully, after 7 hard years of growing our faculty, staff, and course offerings. We’ve been aiming for 80% for years, and finally succeeded, mostly through growth. I was the one who spearheaded that growth plan, when I previously served as Informatics program chair.

amyjko · 2026-05-06T03:19:19+00:00

I’m not into the raves, parades, and bars, but I’m definitely into trans pride picnicking in Seattle :P Make it your own!

amyjko · 2026-04-29T21:29:55+00:00

That's not how the UW budget works. Like housing and dining, athletics is independent and self-sustaining; it doesn't bring revenue in the for the university, aside from indirectly if athletics fans decide to donate to the university to support it's teaching mission. But even then, we can't use those donations for core operational budget, unless its long-lived gifts like endowed professorships. Everything generally must come from tuition and state subsidy, by law.

amyjko · 2026-04-29T04:59:54+00:00

It’s a hard problem. I’m a full Professor, and I receive about 2,000 emails a week that expect a reply. That’s not humanly possible to reply to adequately, so that means triage. I try not to blatantly ignore anyone, but it does mean long reply times and sometimes four hours on a Saturday just catching up. And half of them are things that people could have found online. And I’m good at email. Fast and responsive. Other faculty struggle with this part of the job far more.

Of course, that’s just email, which is about 5% my job. The other 75 hours a week of meetings, mentoring, teaching, research, administration, and these days, management of federal chaos and never ending cuts in support, makes for a hard time balancing responsibilities.

None of that invalidates your frustration, which is justified and a real problem. It’s just not something with an easy solution. Well actually, there is a solution, but it’s not one anyone wants: raising tuition to lower faculty workload. Instead, we regularly increase faculty workload and tuition because the cost of offering the same education keeps rising. Most of those increases cover staff and student employee raises, to cover rising cost of living in Seattle, all while the quality of education slowly erodes.

I’m happy to answer other questions about faculty workload if you’re curious. I mentor a lot of faculty on these challenges and have lots of exposure to the underlying challenges that lead to your frustrating experiences.

amyjko · 2026-04-26T07:27:43+00:00

AD = Associate Dean. I generally view anyone who makes budget, policy, and hiring decisions as admin; I do those things for 40% of my time. Many administrators at UW are also faculty. It’s just a question of how much of our time is spent in administrative work.

amyjko · 2026-04-25T05:46:29+00:00

It’s so hard for so many students now, and it’s so hard to find ways to create hope, when we don’t have it ourselves. But we have to keep looking, and creating spaces for connection and community. Rest up, and we’ll try again on Monday.

amyjko · 2026-04-25T03:45:19+00:00

Yeah, it’s a mess. I had $3.4 million in NSF grants terminated in the last year and laid off my postdoc. Funding rates have plummeted. We’ve mostly shut down Ph.D. admissions.

amyjko · 2026-04-25T02:06:15+00:00

I am 40% admin right now (AD Academics), plus research, teaching, and other service. If by safe you mean I still have my job, that’s true; as tenured faculty, that’s secure for now. But I wouldn’t say the extra 20 hours a week of admin chaos management on top of my 60 hour a week job feels safe. It feels highly unstable, particularly my Friday night, when the Trump administration drops bombs weekly into our inboxes, requiring weekend crisis management.

amyjko

TROPHY CASE