Dear CSE undergrads,
Some of you might have seen or heard about a recent EE web page soliciting their students to sign a petition to change their department’s name to ECE — Electrical and Computer Engineering.
That page has now been taken down, but I’d just like to squash any rumors or confusion that may have resulted – in particular, we are not merging with EE and we will not be creating a joint EECS department at UW.
However, as you may already be aware, over the last few years we have been working jointly with EE on a set of computer engineering courses that would make sense for students in both departments, because students in both departments need basic computer engineering knowledge. Many of you have already taken courses that have both CSE and EE students in them. We have also done joint faculty hires between the two departments, which has been great for both of us. Of course, we also have joint faculty with many other departments, including Statistics, Mathematics, Applied Math, and Genome Science. Such joint hires have lots of advantages and we expect to see more in the future – it’s the way the world is going.
It is true that EE has been thinking about a possible future name change in recognition of the fact that many of their students are already studying aspects of computer engineering (which is a broad field ranging from signals level hardware to high-level software systems, etc.). The details have not been worked out at this point, but this would mainly be a change in name. We are not changing our program, and EE will not dramatically change its program – they would simply change their name to reflect what they already teach. When and if this idea is further along, we would certainly explain in advance what will happen and what it all means.
Most important, we do not expect that such a name change – if it does happen — would impact CSE students in any way or change “the world of CSE as you know it.”
Cheers,
Hank