Here’s my usual report on our fall 2023 enrollments, as of week 2 of the semester.

Commentary

• CS 167 enrollments are robust, with plenty of interest from first-year students, despite being scheduled at 8 and 9 am. Because the Registrar’s office no longer maintains waitlists after the pre-registration period, we don’t know whether there is unmet demand, particularly among first-year students.
• CS 200, ST: Data Visceralization, is Jordan Wirfs-Brock’s new elective in her area of research! I’m impressed that it attracted so many women. I don’t know if she will want to regularize this course or continue to design new special topics courses.
• CS/Math 215 enrollments are robust as well. I think I’ve finally convinced Albert that there is sufficient demand to offer Introduction to Data Science every semester.
• While there are several CS minors and other interested students enrolled in CS 220, enrollments are a good indicator of interest in the CS major. I’m happy with the number of students and I am especially optimistic that we will have a healthy cohort of women CS majors in the next two class years.
• CS 270 is small, and that might be a bit worrisome for the CS major pipeline. However, we ran a total of four sections of CS 270 last academic year, so we’ve presumably cleared any backlog in demand. We tentatively plan to offer two sections of CS 270 in the spring, but I wonder if we should offer a second section of CS 327, Algorithm Design and Analysis, instead.
• CS 301, ST: Advanced Algorithms, is visitor Razie Fathi’s elective offering, which she developed last year at Smith College. The class mainly focuses on practical applications of graph algorithms. (Our visitor continuing from last year, Parteek Kumar, will offer Machine Learning again in the spring.)
• Notably, CS 310 and 320 both have overenrollments and waitlists. We had an angst-ridden pre-registration period with more juniors trying to get into these classes than we were able to accommodate (and some sophomores, too).
• We have 29 CS majors in the class of 2025 — the most ever. It’s a huge jump from 19 in the class of 2024. The College has a whole has high enrollments in the classes of 2025 and 2027. We plan to request a visitor for next year, despite having no sabbaticals, so that we can offer additional sections of intermediate and upper-level courses. This will help accommodate CS minors and other interested students as well as the large number of CS majors.
• Last but not least, we have high school students enrolled in two intermediate-level classes, CS 215 and Math 220, with at least one more inquiry into an upper-level class that we decided not to accommodate. This is a positive indicator for CS course offerings in our local high schools.