At a recent (virtual) gathering of friends and colleagues, Sharon Alker asked, “What were you like as a student?” This blog post is an extended response to her question—partly for Sharon and my other faculty friends, partly for my students (particularly one graduating student who I think might gain some insight into our relationship over the last few years), and partly, as always, for myself.*
Category Archives: Relationships
Responses to “5 ways to welcome women to computer science”
This Monday, my first essay appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education: 5 Ways to Welcome Women to Computer Science. Today, Friday, seems like a good day to reflect on responses. In particular, I want to talk about social media responses from institutions and individuals, and an in-person conversation with Whitman CS students and faculty.
Seven Tips for Advertising Your Graduate Program to Undergraduate Programs
My latest post appears in Computing Research News and also here. Continue reading
Hosting LACS 2017
Regular readers might remember that I am the newest member of the Liberal Arts Computer Science (LACS) Consortium. (An earlier post responded to the 2016 annual meeting.) As the newest member, I was invited to host this year’s meeting. Some joked with me that this is hazing, but more accurately it’s paying my dues to an organization that truly depends on the contributions of all its members. It is also the host’s privilege to invite guests of her choosing from both her own institution and others. Finally, I’ve also been invited to host other professional meetings at Whitman in years to come. My experience hosting LACS—a small group who I know fairly well—makes me more confident I can do so. Continue reading
Visiting speakers
I was so busy this spring that I didn’t blog on our three wonderful visiting speakers! I did not post about them in the CS @ Whitman group on Facebook either—an oversight I will rectify in the future. In the meantime, here’s a brief summary of those three visits, with thanks to those who made them possible, and a glimpse at what may come in the fall.
End-of-year reflections, 2016
With the busy-ness of the semester over and the turning of another year, it is a time for looking back and looking forward.
Last week my Grinnell colleague Sam Rebelsky shared some end-of-semester reflections. I’m going to try this exercise too. Continue reading
Report: Grinnell CS Reunion
Before there was any inkling that I would leave Grinnell, SamR and I hatched a plan for Grinnell’s first computer science affinity reunion. We decided on Fall 2016, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the CS major, the 10th anniversary of the CS department (which happened to coincide with my arrival at Grinnell in 2006), and department founder Henry Walker‘s transition to senior faculty status. Continue reading
I’ve got a POSSE
When Grinnell College announced that its relationship with the Posse Foundation would end, many folks at Whitman asked me what I thought or if I had any inside information. This post is not about that Posse.
Rather, it’s about my experiences with the Professor’s Open Source Software Experience (POSSE), an NSF-funded project that engages faculty from across the US in developing and deploying learning activities that engage computing students with humanitarian free and open source software (HFOSS).
How I spent my time at SIGCSE 2016
Each year in March, the Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) hosts the Annual Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, SIGCSE for short. SIGCSE is a medium-sized conference; the final registration count for SIGCSE 2016 was 1243. It’s usually in a medium sized city big enough to have a convention center, but not too expensive for the high school and community college teachers who often don’t have institutional support to attend. This year it was in Memphis. Don’t ask me about Memphis: As usual, I didn’t see much beyond the convention center.
Public relations
When I took on this new role, I knew I would become the face of computer science at Whitman – at least for the first year or two. But I didn’t fully appreciate what that would mean. In this post, I consider the many ways in which I am representing computer science at Whitman.