Faculty Spotlight - Praveen Mittal
Tell us about yourself
I have been teaching in the MSSE program since 2013 and have loved every bit of it. I would like to call myself an entrepreneur by heart, although I am not there yet. Some of the roles I've played in my professional life, so far, are a student (forever), a teacher, a coach and, somewhat of an entrepreneur. I love all of these roles and would like to continue them. I have been coaching leaders, teams and organizations around the Twin Cities in the areas of agile, product, lean, devOps and business agility. On the personal side, I grew up in India in the state of Rajasthan (one of the hottest places) and, after finishing my BS in computer science, in 1996 I moved to Minnesota (somewhat cold I guess :)) I am married and have two kids. My little one keeps me quite busy when I am not working.
What led you to the field of software engineering?
It feels like getting into the field of software engineering was a pleasant accident. While growing up, I never aspired to be a software engineer. The expectations from parents at that time was to be either an engineer or a doctor. I knew I wanted to go to the engineering side so I gave the state level engineering exam and was fortunate to be in the top 100 students. The choice of majors was dependent upon your ranking. Only the top 50 ranking students could get into Electronics and Communication. I had "settle" for the second ranked major, which was Computer Science. I am glad that I had to settle and I consider it a pleasant accident. Once I started programming and got the taste of software engineering, I was obsessed and have been loving it ever since.
What are your areas of interest in the field?
For the last several years, I have been most curious about business agility, team agility, leadership, and high performing teams. I love to learn and to help leaders, teams, and organizations in this space.
What do you enjoy most about teaching in the MSSE program?
My favorite thing has to be class discussion. Every year I am amazed at the learning that happens due to the COLLECTIVE knowledge and experience that students bring to the class. Apart from that, I enjoy the in-class exercises and creativity/effort/thoughtfulness students put into their assignments.
Describe your teaching philosophy. How can a student be successful in your course?
Learning is an interesting phenomena and each of us learns in a variety of ways. For students to really understand concepts, multiple methods need to be applied even for one topic. I try to use a variety of learning methods such as video lectures, required reading, in-class discussions, real life assignments, quizzes, and scenario-based discussions and exercises.
The key outcome of my course is for students to be in a position to excel in leading or managing a software development team/effort. After taking this course, I expect students to be able to (doesn’t mean they have to) take a leadership/influencing position at their workplaces.
To get the most out of my course, participate in class discussion, do assignments / readings / quizzes / in-class exercises with sincerity, ask a lot of questions, and reach out to me 1:1 if something is confusing or not clear. Try to contextualize what you learn in the class to your current or prior workplaces and look for ways to apply what you are learning in the real world.
If you could give students one piece of advice, what would that be?
Be curious. Experiment. Prefer progress over perfection. Sometimes we want to try something and desire to be perfect at the get go. That takes at lot of time or, in most cases, will never happen. Instead, if you break it down into smaller parts and keep experimenting and trying, you will reach your goals faster. Take risks. There is a famous saying “Nothing grows in a comfort zone”.