Thursday, April 6, the steering committee for the Computing, Data Science and Applied Science Initiative hosted a town hall on Zoom. Co-chairs Vice Provost for Academic Affairs David Yalof and Arts and Sciences Acting Dean and professor of English Suzanne Raitt attended the town hall to answer student questions, along with several other professors on the committee.
Professor of computer science and Director of data science Anthony Stefanidis, research professor Majorie A.M. Friedrichs, visiting faculty member for business law Iria Giuffrida and Sidney P. Chockley Professor of computer science Evgenia Smirni also attended the event as members of the steering committee.
Secretary of Data and Analytics for Student Assembly and Omnibus Project Director John Willis ’23 presented updates on a recent student survey.
“This past semester, the Student Assembly started an initiative where we created a survey that was sent out to the student body, and it measured students’ opinions on primarily a variety of topics related to Student Assembly initiatives, bills that are being put forth and such,” Willis said. “We also partnered with some members of the steering committee to include some questions just to measure and see where students are at relative to their knowledge of the steering committee and how they’re feeling towards the values of some of the plans being put forth.”
Willis reported that though most students who responded to the survey were not aware of the wider purpose of the steering committee, students showed a positive response to a survey question regarding students’ use of data science as a core laboratory value.
“The survey says that students are in support of the values of the committee, but they just don’t necessarily have a full grasp and they have some questions about how it will affect other aspects of campus, especially how it will affect tuition and how it will affect other class offerings and data science class offerings,” Willis said.
In the survey, students were able to ask three questions pertaining to the steering committee.
“The number one question that came up from students was, ‘Will this new initiative be cutting funding from the humanities department for its creation?’ I think the big question there is, where’s the funding for the program coming from and how will it affect other departments moving forward?” Willis said.
“The number one question that came up from students was, ‘Will this new initiative be cutting funding from the humanities department for its creation?’ I think the big question there is, where’s the funding for the program coming from and how will it affect other departments moving forward?” Willis said.
Raitt responded to this question, speaking to her role as the current Acting Dean of Arts and Sciences.
“I personally, as the Dean, would not like to see the funding for other units adversely affected by the funding for a new unit, including computer science, data science and applied science,” Raitt said. “I don’t want to speak for Evgenia and Tony, because they came up with the concept, but I think that one of the possibilities that’s certainly open to those departments if they have more visibility within the institution is enhanced state funding, enhanced philanthropic funding and enhanced external grant funding.”
Raitt expressed her desire to bring in new money that supports the units rather than reallocate money supporting other aspects of arts and sciences.
Smirni followed up on the points that Raitt made, mentioning existing funding from the state for computer science degrees.
“There are funds that exist within the state of Virginia that provide for high demands of degrees, and also for degrees in computer science. We have been fortunate enough to receive a significant amount of money just for the growth of specific areas. With this initiative, we would like to be able to take advantage of things like that that the state of Virginia makes available to all of its universities,” Smirni said.
“There are funds that exist within the state of Virginia that provide for high demands of degrees, and also for degrees in computer science. We have been fortunate enough to receive a significant amount of money just for the growth of specific areas. With this initiative, we would like to be able to take advantage of things like that that the state of Virginia makes available to all of its universities,” Smirni said.
Willis asked the committee another question from the student survey regarding the availability of classes to students not in the computer and data science program.
“The second question was, will this make it more difficult for students outside of the new unit to take classes within the unit? For instance, if you wanted to take a data science class but you weren’t going to apply to be in the new unit, could you still take a data science class? What would be the protocol for that?” Willis said.
Stefandis responded to Willis’ question, addressing the desire of the steering committee to keep the needs of students at the forefront of the program.
“We do not want to block students from entering these programs. You have to keep in mind, of course, that there may be some realistic issues with how many students we may have, etcetera, but that being said, we’ll do our best to make sure that we cater to all the needs of our student communities. I cannot guarantee that we will be perfectly doing that from day one, but I’m certain that we’ll come back on day two and find a solution to the problems that we have in day one,” Stefandis said.
Heather Acuña ’25 commented on her experience as a computer science major and her observations of students’ interest in computer science classes, despite limited availability.
“As it stands, I know that the computer science department is not able to offer many COLL 100 or 150 classes because of the current way things are structured and the current amount of support we get. So, with more support, I almost feel that we could potentially bring more people and offer more classes, especially to incoming freshmen, to give them those skills that we aren’t able to at the moment,” Acuña said.
Similarly, the chair of the ACM Computer Science Club and computer science and linguistics double major Amanda Michel ’24 shared her thoughts on the opportunities available for nonmajors to take computer science classes.
“I wanted to share part of my perspective as somebody who is coming from a cross-disciplinary sort of perspective. It’s just, generally, people who have any amount of interest in computer science who aren’t necessarily majors, don’t really have the opportunities to, because the only intro classes we can offer are the ones that are intro classes for the major. And that’s sometimes not exactly what people want and it doesn’t really focus in an interdisciplinary way,” Michel said.
Michel acknowledged the space limitations in classes for both nonmajors and majors, mentioning the history of statistics regarding the ratio of professors or graduate students to undergraduate students.
“We’re extremely interested in that, and that goes exactly back to the point I made earlier to John, there is tremendous interest for data, that’s true, but at the same time, we have to better understand what type of data. There’s a sense of data literacy, but to what extent should that data literacy have different constituencies and this is what we try to assess. We need to do that properly, we need to have that discussion and come up with the best solutions for the students and pursue them,” Stefandis said.
The steering committee encourages students to contact Yalof or Raitt, as well as any members of the committee, to address questions about the program.
“Just because it doesn’t get asked in the town hall doesn’t mean that it’s not a good question that we’d like to hear,” Yalof said.
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