The Department of Computer Science has six full-time faculty, each with a Ph.D. in computer science, and there are many opportunities to perform research with them. Each summer, a number of students work with computer science faculty in their areas of research. Several students have been co-authors on peer-reviewed papers presented at national and international conferences or published in research journals. In addition, we have received funds from the National Science Foundation to build a parallel cluster of workstations. These workstations will be using dual processor AMD Opteron technology. The College has also matched these funds to enable the machines to be replaced every two years and ensure that we stay at the cutting edge of the field.
One of the unique points of our curriculum is that we teach software engineering in the second year – most schools teach this in the fourth year. Students learn many useful skills early on that will help them in finding internships. The program culminates in a second software engineering course in the senior year (CS 470 – Senior Project) where the students work with real clients (outside the College) in developing software projects.
The educational experience is enhanced by the student chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery, the professional society of computer scientists. The chapter organizes field trips, guest lectures, and other social activities.