Computer Science At Swarthmore College
We currently offer a wide variety of courses on a regular basis. Many of our upper level courses are offered in alternate years. Depending on student-faculty interest and availability of faculty resources, we offer additional courses on an irregular basis. There are also courses of special interest to CS students offered by the departments of Engineering, Mathematics, Linguistics, and Psychology.
Our Computer Science program is small but good. You can get an excellent background for graduate school or meaningful employment. You cannot take 20 courses in CS here but you can take 15 really good courses in the most fundamental areas of CS. Our students who want to go to graduate school get into quality graduate programs. Those who want employment have found many offers with both small companies and large well-known companies. Our small program resides in a setting of other excellent liberal arts departments and a small but excellent engineering department.
Although our program is regarded by some as moderately theoretical, we have had programming teams make it to the international finals of the ACM International Programming Contest 3 times in the last 15 years and we have won some international robot competitions. I do not know of any other small college that can say this.
About 15-25 students graduate each year with a CS major and another 8 with a CS minor or concentration.
Most of our good students who want to go to graduate school get admitted to schools that are ranked in the top 10. Relatively few get admitted to the top 4 but it does happen. This year (for entry in Fall 2002), we have students accepted at Stanford, MIT, and Carnegie Mellon (generally regarded as the top three graduate schools in CS).
Sometimes our best students choose medicine, law, teaching, or a job in industry.
I believe that Swarthmore students are more intellectually curious and more honestly interested in academic matters than students at any other college or university. This certainly does not mean that our students don't party or have fun. They do. What it does mean is that they attack learning and intellectual activity with gusto.
The Computer Science Program currently consists of four tenure track faculty. Charles Kelemen originated the Program in 1985 and specializes in theory of computation. Lisa Meeden joined the Program in 1994 with a research focus of artificial intelligence and cognitive science. Tia Newhall was hired in 1999. She studies cluster computing and distributed systems. We just hired Richard Wicentowski, a new Ph. D. from Johns Hopkins University, who will start in Fall 2002. His research area is natural language processing. In addition, Bruce Maxwell of the Engineering Department, who's research includes computer vision and robotics, offers numerous computer engineering courses that are cross-listed in Computer Science and play a crucial role in our curriculum.
As our Program has grown, so has the number of students who are pursuing honors. A fundamental piece of the honors major is a two-credit thesis which is done in close consultation with a faculty member. Typically, an honors major will spend the summer between junior and senior years on campus doing research and will then spend the fall semester of the senior year writing the thesis. A number of joint faculty-student papers have resulted from these research collaborations.
Our students have competed and been quite successful at the national level in robot and programming contests. In 1999 and 2000, Swarthmore College won robot contests at the annual American Association of Artificial Intelligence conference. Several times in the past decade our students have qualified for the International Finals of the Association for Computing Machinery programming contest. This requires being in the top 50 of about 1,000 teams that compete in regional contests around the world.
Many of our students ultimately attend graduate school, after working in industry for several years. We have had students accepted at the best graduate schools in our field: Stanford, MIT, CMU, Berkeley, University of Washington. Swarthmore ranks fourth (in absolute numbers) among private four-year institutions for baccalaureate origins of Ph.D.s in Computer Science awarded during the ten year period 1986-95. We are first when you normalize by the size of the undergraduate population.
Charles F. Kelemen, Professor
Chair, Computer Science Department
Swarthmore College
500 College Avenue
Swarthmore, PA 19081
(610) 328-8515