How to advertise your Computer Science department

(...or at least how I did)

I wanted to write this blog post because:

1. I'm proud of the brochure I made for my CS department when I was a member of the CS Ambassadors club, one year ago.
2. I realized that my CS department wasn't all that great at describing what it was about—and I imagine it isn't just my university that has this problem.
3. I believe that if a department can't describe Computer Science in an intriguing way at university and outreach events, they're throwing away a valuable method of drawing in new students. Mainly those who already know about Computer Science before college will enroll, which bodes badly for diversity in your department.

Here is the original flyer (click to enlarge if you like). To be fair, it's more an "intro to the major" brochure than an outreach brochure, which could explain the wordiness. But that can't explain the picture of a guy looking into what I assume is a chemistry machine? Or the idea that one of the best jobs you can get with this degree is Mac Genius?

I decided I wanted to emphasize a few things in my version:

• People, including women (looking back, I should have been more conscious about including minority students, but luckily I got a representative sampling of photos)
• What CS is exactly, and options for what you can do with it beyond software engineering
• Links for students to explore CS on their own, so the flyer could serve as a more general outreach tool in high schools and middle schools

Here's how it turned out! (You can click to make the images larger)

If you can find some use for my original Word document in your own project, feel free—it's here [docx, 23.3 MB]. If you don't have the font I used, it's here. I also welcome your comments for improvement!

If I were to redo it today, I'd probably search for better links for the CS-related games and resources section—maybe there is something more interactive than downloading those books I recommended. I would also try to make it look more professional. But I think it represents our department pretty well, and at least now there's something to hand out to potential students. We might not be able to compete with the gorgeous, glossy brochures from engineering without professional graphic designers, but hey, it's a start.

After the jump, see more examples of what I think makes good advertising for Computer Science departments.

Getting started in open source, PyData style

I'm attending/volunteering at PyData, and it's been great. Tutorials on pandas, Matplotlib, and NumPy were very useful, and meeting real-world data scientists is fantastic. Volunteering is a great excuse for saying hello to people (like Google director of research Peter Norvig!), as is helping attendees with their Matplotlib questions.

I was moved to blog by a panel featuring heavy contributors to major open source Python packages, including SciPy, pandas, IPython, scikit-learn, and CherryPy. This discussion and my observations of the PyCon sprints have changed my mindset: contributing to open source software has become much less intimidating! I want everyone to have this feeling, but particularly female students, because we are especially underrepresented in the OSS (open source software) world. Even small contributions to projects could be a way to impress employers, and could help change the ratio in CS overall.

The moderator asked the panelists about non-typical answers to the question of how people can get started contributing to OSS. Here are my favorite (paraphrased) quotes:

Documentation is HIGHLY needed. Improving documentation can be a great way to get started if you don't want to contribute code yet. Not only will it help you learn the project and the language, but the beginner perspective is often lacking from current documentation

Check out the pull requests on GitHub and contribute to the discussion. You can do this without having contributed any code yourself. Your perspective as a user is important.

Contribute cookbook-style examples, to help people see the forest for the trees and get into using the package. You could possibly throw it up as a gist, and/or perhaps as a IPython notebook. These are very helpful to expand the community and help developers see how to best grow the library for users. We [developers] don't see the successful use cases, instead we see the bugs.

Here were quotes that were a bit more conventional or more difficult to achieve, but still worth thinking about:

Check out the issues tracker on GitHub and see if there are any problems you can try to fix. On scikit-learn's repository we have labeled some issues "easy", so they would be good for new programmers.

Join someone who already knows what they are doing. Talk to them at sprints at conferences and perhaps code next to them. Tell them what your "pain points" are and maybe they can do something to help. In fact, developers want to know things that are issues for average users, for example: "this was difficult to understand in the documentation" or "this was tricky to use". Let us know, so we can have a friendlier product and grow the community.  

"Scratch your own itch" — discuss or fix a problem that you yourself have.

Consider helping with a project that's not so mature, you can have more influence.

My attempt at selling CS + Science to middle school girls

     My department head convinced me and another senior in the Computer Science department to be "career panelists" at a local one-day conference meant to introduce science careers to middle school girls.

     Sometimes CS gets left out of the "STEM" conversation, and this event was a good example: my classmate and I were the only advocates for computing, and there were no technology workshops at all, despite hands-on virtual reality and robotics events being advertised. There were fantastic astronomy, biology, and chemistry workshops however.
     I mentioned this to the organizer, and she reminded me that it was a completely volunteer-run event, and no one volunteered to offer technology workshops. I wondered how much responsibility the organizers had for reaching out to people in technology, or in that case reaching out to minority speakers (all presenters I saw were Caucasian, while the students were 90% Latina), but that's for another blog post.

In any case, by some estimates computing jobs will be 50% of all STEM jobs by 2018, so we better get on this!

Izzy and I were on the task as Computer Science evangelists. Below the jump is the text of my talk.

CSEd Week!

I'm participating in Computer Science Education Week! It's a movement to get people involved in promoting CS education at a grass-roots level. Although it's set for the week of Grace Hopper's birthday (Dec 9-15), you can participate at any time that's good for you. This is great for me, because that is my finals and graduation week! Get more info and pledge your support at http://www.csedweek.org/.

I plan to blog about my views on CS education as a university student who has been involved in several outreach projects. My main goal is to create a list of resources for teachers to incorporate CS into their classrooms, which can be distributed at teacher fairs and other outreach events. Let me know if you have ideas!

Archaeogingrichasaur

From Newt's YouTube page:

Dinosaurs! What! 

Googling reveals that liberal websites have documented some of Former Speaker Gingrich's mentions of dinosaurs. I think the best of all is this tweet from about a year ago. 

Source

The attempt to show humility by putting a T-Rex skull in one's office is just so Newt.