Should Purdue Computer Science move to the College of Engineering?
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I am curious what everyone in CS thinks about this topic, as well as the resignation of former Head Aditya Mathur. How does this affect the students in CS? What are the benefits and drawbacks? If you do not know anything about the possible move or the resignation of Aditya Mathur, see resources below: White Paper on the Discussion of Computer Science and Engineering --Haddada 12:39, 20 September 2010 (UTC) |
I think its a good decision to bring CS dept. under School of Engineering and this change should have been made much before. CS and CompEE curriculum goes hand in hand. ECE students can then select interesting courses from CS field without much fuss about it being in another academic department. Even for the CS students, they can get a good taste of hardware courses. The ECE elective list will get a variation and expand the horizon for student to select from. In the industry, people are looking for students who are equally adept at writing software and hardware programming. Hence I completely support the idea of adding CS to Purdue's array of Engineering schools. --Apanja 09:03, 23 September 2010 (UTC)Ananya Panja
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Computer Engineering and Computer Science are now nearly two parallel programs running on the Purdue, West Lafayette campus. There is a significant overlap among 19 courses and 11 research areas. In addition there are at least 12 courses in CS that would excite Engineering students and would be offered to them if CS were in Engineering. Similarly, there are at least 3 courses in CompE that may excite CS majors and that do not overlap with any course in CS.
Since 1996 there has been no coordinated hiring and no coordinated academic program development. The result? (a) Massive waste of dollars each year. Both departments hire and have faculty in compilers, networking, data Mining, software engineering, graphics and visualization, software engineering, etc. (b) Students in Engineering are denied fantastic opportunities to learn Computer Science. (c) CS students do not have access to an Architecture Track. (d) There are no dual degree options. Such an option would allow, for example, a Mechanical Engineering student to do a dual degree in Mech E and CS in 5-years. (e) Several students who come to CompE because it is in the highly regarded College of Engineering, often wish that they had come to CS; and some of them switch to CS even at the expense of a few courses. (f) Some students who wish to graduate from CoE but cannot get admitted, come to CS in Science, spend a semester or two, and then move to CoE in CompE.
So why has Purdue not acted on this issue even though it is now about three years old and 16 full professors in CS supported the idea in a letter to the provost in early 2009, and three of the former dept heads in town are in full support of this move? (a) A small group of CS full professors, 5 to be precise, are against the move purely for highly selfish reasons (no concern for student benefits). (b) The ECE administration, I am told, is scared that if CS comes to CoE then they will lose students from CompE. (c) Administrators in Science wish to keep CS in Science as it adds to the Science budget as well as reputation.
The Exponent and local newspapers have not shown any interest in this issue for unknown reasons. And all this despite the tough financial times and a threat for increasing student fees! Letters have been sent to the Purdue President clearly showing the appalling overlap between CompE and CS. Perhaps they have some ideas on how to solve the problem.
Aditya Mathur
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As many of you may know, Prof. Mathur (CS) and others put a couple of years into trying to push a proposal to remove some of the barriers between the Computer Engineering and Computer Science departments. This effort seems to have melted down in a clash of personalities. Our general impression has been that students were largely in favor of the effort. In a recent conversation with the Provost, we were encouraged to bring the student interests on the matter before the deans of the respective schools. At the level of the deans and above, it seems that the is a relative ignorance to student desire for such an alignment.
Please take a few moments to meet tomorrow, Tues April 5th at 5:30 in EE 170 to give your opinions. We need to hear how the current programs are affecting your choices as students (both graduate and undergraduate). Corporate sponsors have been invited to talk about what they want to see in graduating students. We will be gather opinions and bringing them to Dean Roberts and Dean Jamieson. Please come out even for a little bit to show that students care about the curriculum. What barriers have you had to getting the education that you want?
These issues not only affect us today but also the reputation and standing of the schools we come from. This is important. There have been rumors of an even bigger change to create a school of computing (merging several departments), what would you think of this? Please join the debate for or against this.
Thank you, Computer Science Graduate Student Board
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Note: The opinions found herein are those of the authors of the the comments and not of Purdue/NSF or Motorola.
