A week ago, I returned from a six-week trip abroad. In this post, I’ll reflect on my goals for the trip and how they were (or were not) accomplished. In my next post, I’ll discuss the transition from traveling on sabbatical to being on sabbatical at home. Continue reading
Today I rebooted my mid-range career plan, on the timescale of about one month to two years out. To my surprise, I found myself using Trello. How did that happen? Read on. Continue reading
My latest post appears in Computing Research News and also here. Continue reading
This week I decided to visit Emberfuel Coworking in downtown Walla Walla for their monthly first-Friday open house. My faculty office opens onto the CS Commons, which I’m sure will fill up with students again once classes resume. So, I’m looking for other places to work during my sabbatical.
I’ve been curious about Emberfuel for a while. I learned about the open house from Meetup.com, which a LACS colleague persuaded me to join at our annual meeting about a month ago. Here are my first impressions. Continue reading
Some have asked what books are in my piles of sabbatical reading in this picture, which appears in yesterday’s post.
It’s too much to put in a caption, so it gets a whole post of its own! I’ll list what’s in each pile starting from the left, top to bottom, with occasional commentary. Continue reading
For me, June marked the beginning of a year-long sabbatical. This meant an abrupt return to the research I almost entirely neglected during my first year back to teaching and administration after the birth of my child. All I had done was write two proposals – one for summer research, and one for the sabbatical itself.
This won’t be a post about the content of my research: that’s a topic for later in the year. Rather, this post discusses the habits I’ve retained from the academic year, new habits I am forming now, and habits I am considering for later in my sabbatical. Continue reading
In this post, I report on our first senior exit interviews. This spring also marked our second year of participation in the CRA Data Buddies survey and Whitman’s second year of major program assessments. Continue reading
With busy office hours for CS 210, my husband’s travel for work, child care disruptions, and ping-ponging viruses among the members of the family, I found no time in April for my traditional post on the next semester’s pre-registration. Summer is catch-up time. So with no further ado, here’s the summary table:
| Number | Title | Enrolled | Women:Men | Waitlist |
| CS 167-A,B | Intro. Computational Problem Solving | 33/60 | 1:1 | |
| CS/Math 220 | Discrete Math & Functional Programming | 27/24 | 1:3.5 | |
| CS 270 | Data Structures | 17/24 | 1:5 | |
| CS 310 | Computer Systems Programming | 25/20 | 1:2 | 2 |
| CS 320 | Theory of Computation | 21/20 | 1:2.5 | 1 |
| CS 357 | Natural Language Processing | 26/16 | 2:3 | 16 |
| CS 495 | Capstone Project | 19/16 | 1:2 |
This Sunday, we graduated our first full class of 15 computer science majors! Thirteen of them are shown below, along with an independent major in “Data Science and Energy Systems”, celebrating after their capstone team presentations at the Whitman Undergraduate Conference. We have a lot to be proud of!
A distinctive component of Whitman’s curriculum is the senior assessment in the major. Indeed, Whitman claims to be “the first college or university in the nation to require undergraduate students to complete comprehensive examinations in their major fields.”
In this post I address the design of the senior assessment in computer science and reflect briefly on my first experience with that assessment. Continue reading