I would like to see more emphasis placed on skills that are useful in the average professional CSC career (read: software development techniques, systems administration, etc.) and less emphasis on course material that's not terribly useful once you leave college, e.g., context-free grammars, _yet another_ assignment where you reinvent a linked list or array-expansion logic.

From my vantage point, I see most CSC graduates, particularly those who don't pursue a secondary degree, never needing red-black trees, advanced logic theory, or Calculus III in their professional careers. I would like to see more of students' time at the University spent on learning to code well, use software development tools, and use technologies like SQL. I would also like to see this stuff appear earlier in the curriculum. My opinion is the advanced topics are better left for undergrad electives or for grad school.

There's a lot of room for disagreement in all of that. If you disagree, feel free to drop into irc.freenode.net #ncsulug and talk to me about it.

-Brian

On Thu, Apr 15, 2010 at 6:42 PM, Edward Anderson < nilbus@nilbus.[redacted] > wrote:

I may attend this.  Is there any feedback all you computer science students want to give about how things are going in our department?

Edward

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dr. Barbara Jasmine Adams < barbara_adams@ncsu.[redacted] >
Date: Mon, Apr 12, 2010 at 1:28 PM
Subject: [csc-seniors] Share Your Ideas About the Department: Mon. Apr. 19 at 1pm
To: undergrad-students@csc.ncsu.[redacted]
Cc: bahler@ncsu.[redacted]


Bcc: CSC/CSU Students

Greetings:

You will want to read the below invitation from the Department's Strategic
Planning Committee.

****************************************************************************
The Strategic Planning Committee (SPC) is currently working to update
the department's strategic plan. Our strategic plan is a long-term
framework that formalizes the department's goal, mission, and vision, and
describes the strategies we will use to achieve our goal.  The SPC is
currently meeting with various groups to solicit input for the upcoming
plan.

We would like to invite interested undergraduate  students to meet
and talk with the SPC at 1:00 next Monday, April 19 in 3211 EB-II.  I
hope you will take this opportunity to discuss with us your ideas about
how undergraduate students and the undergraduate program will fit into
our long-term strategic vision.

Annie Anton, Christopher Healey, Tao Xie, George Rouskas

****************************************************************************

--
Barbara Jasmine Adams, Ph.D.
Director of Advising
Department of Computer Science
NC State University
1204 Engineering Building II (EB II)
Campus Box 8206
Raleigh, NC 27695

Phone: XXX-513-7888
Fax: XXX-513-1684
E-mail: barbara_adams@ncsu.[redacted]


--
Barbara Jasmine Adams, Ph.D.
Director of Advising
Department of Computer Science
NC State University
1204 Engineering Building II (EB II)
Campus Box 8206
Raleigh, NC 27695

Phone: XXX-513-7888
Fax: XXX-513-1684
E-mail: barbara_adams@ncsu.[redacted]