Report on Undergraduate Forum of Feb. 18, 2004

The CIS Undergraduate Studies Committee (UGSC) organized the annual CIS undergraduate forum on Feb. 18, '04 in DL 317. Originally scheduled to last from 6:30 pm to about 8:00 pm, the forum continued a bit beyond 8:30 pm, with many students staying on till the end. The summary below tries to describe the main points that were made during the discussions but it defintely does not capture the enthusiasm of the participants. Thanks to all who came to the forum and made it such a success.

Students:
Lon Allen, CSE senior; James Bishop, CSE freshman; Kyle Boon, CSE senior;
Peter Brooks, CSE sophomore; Michael Camperino, CSE senior; Anthony DiCola, CSE senior;
Gavin Fox, CIS junior; Hye-yoon Han, CIS junior; Daniel King, CSE senior;
Justin Martinek, CIS; Brad Moore, CIS senior (BS/MS); John Moore, CSE freshman;
Keith Rustan, CSE senior; Aisha Salim, CIS senior; Matt Schwaberow, CSE senior;
Nick Seddon, CSE junior; Aaron Shbeeb, CSE senior; Jon Simon, CSE senior;
Josh Smith, CIS senior; Emanuel Vargas, CSE junior; Mike Welsh, CSE senior;
Jin Yu, CSE senior; Nick Walker, ECE senior;

Faculty: Rick Parent, Rajiv Ramnath, Neelam Soundarajan, Bruce Weide, Stu Zweben (Dept. Chair).
Advising office: Ming Liu, Peg Steele.

1. Stu Zweben presented a summary of the "state of the department". Stu touched on the following items in his summary:
   • The department's name has officially changed to "Computer Science and Engineering". (There is no change in the names of our undergraduate major programs; they will still be called, Computer Science and Engineering and Computer and Information Science respectively. This did not come up at the forum but in a current discussion on the cis.undergrads newsgroup, some have suggested that following the change in the name of the department, it would indeed make sense to change the name of the CIS major to Computer Science.)
   • The GPA requirement for admission to the majors has dropped from a high of 3.2 to the current 2.8; the dept. will continue to monitor the demand and make further adjustments as needed.
   • A number of new courses have been introduced into the curriculum (in the areas of security, computer vision, animation, data mining, visualiztion, etc.).
   • There is a new minor in Business (consisting of five courses) that should be of interest to both CIS and CSE students.
   • A number of new faculty, both junior and senior, have been hired and have either joined the dept. or are expected to do so shortly.
   • A search is under way for a new department chair. A number of promising candidates have been interviewed.
   • Nearly 50 undergraduate students have been working on various research projects with our faculty. (Students interested in doing an independent project, either involving original research or perhaps serious system-implementation activities should take a look at projects (http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/~weide/sce/now/projects.html) web site.)
   • A number of our faculty have won awards, grants, and other recognitions for their professional contributions.
   • The Center for Applied Software and Technology is up and running. It currently has two full-time faculty, Drs. Ramnath and Stovsky who are expected to engage in various types of projects that will be of interest to the local software industry, as well as teach regular courses in software engineering.

2. GPA requirement for admission to the major: This was not as major a topic as in past years, perhaps because of the recent drop in the GPA requirement from a high of 3.2 to the current 2.8, following moderation of demand from students for entry into the major. In fact, the requirement is expected to go down further in the coming quarters.

3. RESOLVE in the curriculum: This was as popular a topic of discussion as in past years. Here are some of the points that were made:
   • RESOLVE does not allow experiencing the actual complications of software development.
   • It may be useful to have another course between CIS 321 (the last in the RESOLVE sequence) and CIS 560 where students have to do a considerable of design and code development on their own. Some expressed the opinion that in many of the 560-teams, one member of the team does all the code development and others take care of things like documentation since they do not have the ability to develop code on their own.
   • It may be useful to require students to have taken one of the CIS 459 courses before taking 560, provided the 459's themselves are improved so that they don't end up teaching just basic syntax of the language.
   • Continuing on that same theme, it may be useful to consider converting the 459's into regular 3-credit courses.
   • Instead of another course between the RESOLVE-sequence and CIS 560, another alternative would be another course before CIS 221. Currently, students are required to have taken (or placed out of) CIS 201 before taking 221. But 201 may be too elementary, and having another course between 201 and 221 might help students develop their coding skills adequately before going into the conceptual issues that the RESOLVE-sequence focuses on.

4. CSE capstone courses: The new animation course is now a regular course (CIS 682). Given its heavy emphasis on design activities, it seems highly suited to be a CSE capstone course. The Undergraduate Studies Committee will consider adding it to the list of approved capstone courses later this quarter. (Until that time, CSE students who wish to use 682 as their capstone course, may petition the committee; students should talk to Peg Steele about this.)

5. Interaction with advisors: Some students noted that the amount of interaction between students and their faculty advisors is rather minimal, indeed many students see their advisor for the first time when they file for graduation (and have to get the advisor's signature). It would seem that it might help if students met with their advisors regularly. (Response: Many of the questions that students have, such as how to make changes in their course schedule, etc., are best answered by staff in the Advising Office, and that is where students do go for such questions. If a student has technical questions, such as which particular elective would best match their interests and career goals, they should indeed meet with their advisor. It should also be noted that if a student is interested in an undergraduate research project, his or her assigned advisor may not have an appropriate project available. But the advisor should be able to direct them to someone who might. Also see the bullet related to undergraduate research in item (1) above.)

6. Job market: A number of students expressed concerns about the changing job market, outsourcing of IT jobs, etc. Given the state of the job market, it is even more important to ensure that students have the right skills, or the skills that recruiters consider to be the right ones. For example, questions about syntactic code details are quite common in interviews for starting positions. Many students have problems answering such questions satisfactorily since they tend to be most proficient in RESOLVE-C++ which has many important syntactic differences from standard C++.

7. Career Services: Another job-related question has to do with the Engineering Career Servies office and the fact that CIS majors are no longer able to make use of their services. ECS argues that given limited resources, they have to focus on serving engineering students first, and that is the reason they are no longer able to serve CIS majors. The problem is that many recruiters looking to hire Computer Science majors tend to assume that they are all to be found in the Engineering College. Indeed, many recruiters seem to mistake CIS majors for MIS/business-type students.

   The department is trying to work with ECS to try to get them to serve CIS majors again and we hope to have positive results soon.

   Bruce and Rajiv, in a discussion after the forum, also came up with the idea of organizing a technical "interview skills" session once or twice a year. The goal of these sessions would be to answer the kinds of questions that seem to come up in job interviews (questions such as about pointer manipulation in C++, etc.). Perhaps it would also be useful to prepare a "fact book" that would address such questions that students can look through on their own before interviews.