Cs-orientation
From CS Colloquium
This page is intended for discussion about freshman orienation.
Contents |
Departmental visit (six tuesdays at 3:30 for about 1 hour)
Eric's initial note (friday)
Colleagues,
A group of 10-20 entering freshmen who expressed interest in CS will be touring the building on Tuesdays at 3:30 during each of the six orientation sessions this summer.
Many of these students have surprisingly little understanding of or exposure to Computer Science. Olac and I believe that these students would benefit from brief (effectively staged) encounters with faculty in the hall outside of their offices where the guide asks the faculty member “could you tell these students something interesting about the type of work you do in computer science.”
We would be very appreciative if you could be ready to answer that question with a short and engaging description of any topic that you choose that you believe will spark a bit of interest and understanding in these students. We hear from students that they value this sort of input, so your 3-10 minutes will be very well spent.
While these presentations may eventually attract students to research with you, remember that most of these students will not attend CS1 for 3 semesters. It’s probably most helpful if you can provide them some insight into what’s fun and engaging about your corner of computer science.
If you can participate, please indicate availability for each of the six dates by following this link: http://doodle.ch/kkk5wnatcpifxm7n
Nigel's comment (friday)
Eric, it's great that you're doing this: setting up the right motivations and expectations early is very important. And seeing and hearing from multiple faculty members may help them assimilate faster.
You may not want to frame the meetings with faculty so tightly. At my previous institution every faculty member had a minute or so to introduce himself and say whatever he wanted, about research, about CS, about study habits, about life, or whatever. This gave a variety of perspectives on a lot of topics of interest to the students.
Also, you may want to consider not doing this in the hall: the acoustics are bad, both for the students and for those trying to work nearby. Also most students listen better when they're sitting down.
Eric's response (Sunday)
Topic: I agree. Tell students whatever you believe is most important.
Space: dunno. Maybe we pickup faculty participants as we quickly walk by faculty offies on the 2nd floor, and then have a panel discussion in the conference room. The principal shortcoming is that we lose the benefits of pipelining: each faculty participants’ time commitments will extendto 30 minutes (rather than just 5).
I’m posting this discussion to a wiki at http://robust.cs.utep.edu/colloquium/index.php/cs-orientation
Everybody: Please add comments to the wiki and click he 'watch this page' button! (also: don't forget to set "my prefeences" to include your email address)
