Eric M. Silberstein '98 has a way of taking on more than is expected of him.

When the Adams House resident took a job at the University's Instructional Computing Group (ICG), neither he nor anyone else anticipated that he would computerize sectioning at Harvard.

When Silberstein joined the Undergraduate Council, nobody imagined that he would create an electronic way to cast votes which would make a campus-wide election easier.

Yet, in both cases he did those things by applying the computer skills he had been sharpening since the second grade to problems he saw at Harvard.

And, in fact, Silberstein, through two of his programs, is changing the way Harvard does business and is speeding its transition into the information age.

Sectioning

Silberstein's first creation, a general sectioning program, has been successfully used by more than 10 Harvard classes.

From the 70-person English 97 to the four 200-person Expos sorts, faculty have utilized Silberstein's work--and come away impressed.

"Eric's program is actually a very important facet of the services we provide to courses," said Paul Berger, head of the University's ICG.

The genesis for this idea began last summer, while Silberstein was employed at the ICG.

"He approached me with the idea while employed with us doing other tasks," Berger said. "Sectioning was a word I'd never heard before...I just kind of nodded my head at him for about a month until he finally sold it to me."

Silberstein designed the sectioning program to be useful to a wide range of courses.

"There was no one unified sectioning program," he said. "It was initially written just for math classes, but it's a very general program--it can be used for classes from Expos to math."

Silberstein added that the biggest hurdle was not, as one might expect, a technical one.

"I like programming," Silberstein said, "but the challenge here wasn't as much the programming as it was understanding how to accommodate the needs of teachers."