Computer Science Department Blog

I’ve always believed that computing is a wonderful career option for women. There are tons of obvious reasons why we need women to be strongly represented in computing, not the least of which is that half of the people in the world are female, so it’s a real shame to waste all that talent! But here comes an article from Forbes.com, which lists ten top-paying jobs for women — jobs where the unfair salary gap between men and women is somewhat less egregious. And guess what? Positions 4, 5 and 10 on that list are in the computing field. This makes sense! Computing has generally been a meritocracy — if you’re good, you’re good. And many computing careers offer the flexibility of part-time consulting or telecommuting careers, if that works best in certain stages of life. We need more people who are creative and passionate about solving really important problems and making people’s lives better. So if you are a young lady who is pretty good at math and would like to use your smarts and creativity to make a positive difference in the world (and make a good living while you’re at it), why aren’t you thinking about computer science? Please don’t let some worn-out stereotype about computer scientists chase you away from an amazing opportunity!

The Wharton School of Business recently convened a panel of experts to answer the question, “what are the top 30 innovations of the last 30 years?”. The article “A World Transformed” summarizes their conclusions. Not many surprises in there I guess. But it is striking how many of them emerged directly from advances in computer science. I am still amazed how many people I meet who have this vague notion that computer science is old news, and that they need to move on to something new and exciting, like biology or finance. To really believe that computer science is old news, one must believe that this dramatic period of CS-lead innovation is now coming to a screeching halt. Based on the energy and creativity I see in our department, I’m betting that’s not true!

By one measure, yesterday was the 20th anniversary of the World Wide Web. And the guy who was there at the beginning, Tim Berners-Lee, says we are still at the beginning! In his talk yesterday, he’s quoted as saying “The web is not all done; this is just the tip of the iceberg. New changes are going to rock the boat even more.” I doubt there has ever been a technological innovation that got into the hands of so many people, so fast — and not just so that all these people can use the Web, but they can actually contribute to it and create with it. This is one of the main, though certainly the only, reason computer science continues to be such an exciting field. There are so many opportunities to create and invent and solve problems in this still new world of the Web, not to mention the increasingly important and interesting field of studying what the Web is, how people use it, what effect it is having on the world, etc.

Despite all the press reports, people are still hiring — at least in our small corner of the world, and based on talking to company reps who attended our just completed spring career night. Last year at this time we had seventeen companies represented at the spring career event. This year we had twenty-one. Over 200 students, from freshman to soon-to-graduate PhD’s, enjoyed the opportunity to meet with these company representatives. See the pictures here.