Computer science moves to Engineering
Earlier this month the computer science department moved from the College of Science to the College of Engineering, and a USU Board of Trustees vote Nov. 4 made the change official.
Provost Raymond Coward said the change was made to facilitate successful growth within the computer science department and to ensure its graduates can compete in the job market. Some of the specifics of the transition are yet to be finalized.
“As we examined the location of computer science programs at peer institutions, the vast majority of them were located in colleges of engineering,” Coward said. “Thus, in order for us to position our graduates to compete with their peers, who graduate from these other institutions, the deans proposed an administrative shift.”
Dean of Engineering Scott Hinton said he welcomes the addition to the college and believes it is a good home for computer science.
“When you really look at computer science, a lot of the things they do are very similar to electrical engineering and computer engineering. So in ways there’s a lot of similarities,” Hinton said.
He also said computer science has more in common with engineering than it does with other sciences.
“Both computer science and engineering — we really build things — we don’t discover things,” Hinton said. “In science, the real goal is to discover something new. Engineers want to build things. (Computer scientists) want to build things, too.”
Interim head of the computer science department Dan Watson said he agreed the College of Engineering would be the best home for the department in the future.
“These two fields are almost complimentary,” Watson said.
There is a slight ideological distinction between engineering and computer science, Watson said. Computer scientists seek to solve large, general problems using computers as their tools; engineers often use programs and algorithms taught in computer science to solve the specific challenges they face in their field, he said.
Administrators anticipate the move will help computer scientists and engineers work more closely together.
“We hope that the computer science faculty will become integrated with their colleagues in engineering and that it will (create) greater synergy between faculty and students in computer science with colleagues in engineering who share similar research and intellectual interests,” Coward said.
Hinton said he’s already seen an increase in cooperation.
“Since we started down this process, we’ve had quite a few collaborations that have started to bubble up already,” Hinton said.
“We’ve got (computer scientists) that do bioinformatics — well, there’s a great connection to biological engineering,” Hinton said. There are other examples of specific fields in computer science matching up with fields in engineering.”
Watson said students of computer science and engineering have worked together in the past on projects, including development of “CubeSats,” compact satellites that are usually one liter in volume and sometimes use off-the-shelf electronic components.
While the move is intended to help the department and computer science students, the students should notice only minute changes, Watson said.
“The Computer Science department will maintain all of its programs. We aren’t looking to move any of the programs or have changes in the requirements,” Watson said.
He said the faculty of the department determines the curriculum regardless of the college it’s under.
“Of course, the program that we have is always undergoing changes, but those are normal and within the context of what we do as computer scientists,” Watson said.
Sterling Cobb, a junior studying computer science, said he doubts the move will make much difference. Creating more classes that teach skills graduates will need would help more than changing colleges, he said.
“If you want to make (the degree) more competitive … create a curriculum that’s relevant to our job market,” Cobb said. “They just started this year a mobile (application) development class, which is great — but it’s 2011 — maybe five years ago or six years ago. I’ve had to go online onto iTunes University and actually watch Stanford courses to learn that stuff.”
Watson said he’d like to make sure the move isn’t construed to mean the computer science department is struggling.
“The computer science program is not in trouble by any means,” Watson said. “This is not a problem that we’re trying to fix, this is an opportunity that we’re trying to take advantage of. In fact, in computer science we’re a department in which most of our graduates have jobs by the time they walk through the line to receive their diploma.”
– steve.kent@aggiemail.usu.edu