Last year we reduced the longest path through our curriculum from 10 courses (3 1/3 years) down to 6 courses (or 7). This first step in the restructuring of the CS program is expected to make CS more accessible to the large number of Freshmen that typically change their major after the first year. This year we plan to continue the restructuring in two ways. First, we are working on making a number of smaller changes to the curriculum so that it is more integrated and fixing a number of loose ends from last year’s restructuring. Second, we are looking into revamping the contents of our curriculum to increase the overall quality and utility of our major.

Given the importance of computing in modern society, we have been working towards providing more general computing courses to the rest of the university. This initiative has taken on two threads: (i) making a select number of CS courses available as science electives and (ii) providing university study courses in computing. In (i), we seem to have hit a political impasse at the university level on making CS courses available as science electives. In (ii), we have created four new junior cluster courses that will be taught for the first time in university studies this academic year. We hope that these courses will help students access computing topics in their educational studies.

This initiative seeks to improve the quality of the graduate students within our department. We are in need of higher quality graduate students in order to support our funded research portfolio. We plan to accomplish this through (i) more active recruiting, (ii) better communications, and (iii) better entry TA salaries. We will be organizing a set of talks and engage students at local four year colleges (e.g., Reed), encouraging the top students to apply to PSU. We seek to restructure our department to allow a communications and outreach person to help with external visibility of our department. In the short term, we will have several faculty try and keep our website communications reasonably up to date. Finally, we are adjusting TA salaries up to match the offers that perspective students are receiving elsewhere.