CSE Undergrad News

If you are passionate about promoting diversity and are interested in taking on a small leadership role in a CSE community, ACM-W is now offering an Associate Officer Program!

Happy new year!

Here is the overload request form for the first week of courses. This is for current CSE Majors trying to enroll in a CSE Major’s level course that is currently full or add code protected.

If you are wishing to get into a full CSE course, you must fill this out by 5pm tomorrow to be considered for a space.  You should also plan to attend the lecture of any course you are petitioning to overload into.

https://goo.gl/forms/L7dG4a9RYfJzucZ72

We will try to have final decisions out by Thursday evening.  If you previously petitioned for a course and were not admitted during the overload requests we did a few weeks ago, you should fill this new request form out to express that you are still interested in the course.

Thank you,

CSE Advising

The Allen School is hiring more peer advisers! We hope you will consider applying, or encourage friends to apply (you can nominate someone here!).

Peer Advisers are an important part of the CSE Community. They assist with drop-in appointments, give presentations, and will soon be a resource available at the CSE reception desk for quick questions. Peer Advisers help students with course planning, academic exploration, admissions, career exploration and more! They also create resources for students and offer the professional advising staff and faculty an important perspective. It is a fun job that can make a big impact!

We encourage students of all years and backgrounds to apply!

Start Date: early or mid February (with some occasional training beforehand)

Winter & Spring Quarter: 5 – 12 hours a week (Varies depending on special events and time of the quarter- we will work around your class schedule)

Summer: may be an option if you are interested, but not mandatory

Hours are flexible depending on your course schedule!

Pay: $15 per hour (plus some CSE swag!)

Job Duties

-Speak with prospective students and their parents (via phone, email and in-person) about the field of computer science, the Allen School, and the University of Washington.

-Advise UW students who are pre-majors on course planning, academic exploration, admissions, and opportunities outside of the classroom.

-Advise Allen School students on a variety of topics dependant on your year in school and relevant experiences

-Present at information sessions and represent the Allen School at academic fairs and recruitment events

-Help students, prospective students, and parents who come to the CSE reception desk with undergraduate-related questions.

-Ability to have difficult conversations in a compassionate and approachable way

-Work on various projects based on your strengths and interests!

Required Qualities & Experiences

-Empathy and compassion towards students and families of all backgrounds

-Trustworthy with confidential student information

-Good conversation and presentation skills

-Ability to work well on a team and independently

-Making satisfactory progress towards a CS or CE degree (you don’t need to be a perfect student!)

-Demonstrated involvement in something outside of the classroom at UW (either in or outside of the Allen School)

-Willingness to learn and speak about other tech-related majors and opportunities at UW

-Ability to represent the Allen School and the UW in a professional manner

-Willingness to provide and receive feedback

If you would like to apply, please submit a resume and cover letter to Maggie Ryan (maggiem@cs.washington.edu) by Tuesday, January 2nd at 10am. In your cover letter, please address why you want to be a peer adviser and what experiences and qualities you have that would enable you to succeed in the role. Interviews will take place on January 8th and 9th.

The application to participate in a CSE Exchange to Sweden, Switzerland, or Germany is now open! You have until Jan 15th to complete the application:

New this year, you will apply HERE through the Study Abroad Portal. You can also apply for study abroad scholarships through this same application.

Application Details:

• If you want to apply to multiple schools, you must apply separately to each. Please indicate your ranked preferences on your application, if you have them.
• Please include in your essay:
  • Whether you will have finished your  required 300-level CSE coursework and why, if not.
  • Your CSE GPA, which can be found on your degree audit. This can just be added at the bottom of your essay.

Application timeline for CSE Exchanges in the 2018-19 school year:

• NOW: CSE Exchange Application opens
• January 15: Deadline to apply for CSE Exchanges in 2018-19 year
• Feb 15: Applicants notified of decisions via email
• Feb 23: Selected students must commit to the exchange (including intended semester, if going abroad for one semester)

You can read this page with LOTS of details on CSE exchanges. Here are some quick answers to common questions:

• CSE exchanges are open only to CSE majors.
• Students must be at least sophomore standing by credits by the start of winter quarter to apply.
• No foreign language skill is required, though it may be useful.
• Exchanges are designed to last a full year, but one semester is possible.
• CSE majors pay regular UW tuition while abroad, along with expenses like airfare and insurance.
• Interested CSE students apply through CSE in January. Students are selected based on their academic and personal preparation for an exchange.
• CSE students must have completed at least one 300-level CSE course by the time they apply, and should plan on completing most/all 300-level CSE courses prior to their departure.
• All/most of your exchange courses can fulfill CSE requirements, assuming you select courses carefully.

From: Hank Levy <levy@cs.washington.edu>
Date: Wed, Dec 13, 2017 at 12:30 PM
Subject:Exciting building milestones
To: ugrads@cs.washington.edu, vgrads@cs.washington.edu

Dear Allen School family,

I have some great news to share with you regarding our second building, the Bill & Melinda Gates Center, going up across the street.

First, we have reached the halfway point of construction with the “topping out,” a tradition among ironworkers that marks the placement of the final steel beam on a large building or other structure. At this point, our new building has reached its maximum height, and the construction crew is ready to begin work on the enclosure and interior. I am pleased to report that this puts us on track to complete work on schedule by the end of next year.

We also have achieved another important milestone: thanks to a gift of $15 million from Bill and Melinda Gates, we have officially concluded our building fundraising!  You may recall that around two dozen of their longtime friends and colleagues got together earlier this fall to support a naming gift in the couple’s honor. We are thrilled that Bill and Melinda themselves were inspired by our vision to help us across the finish line with their own generous gift.

As we have seen through their work with Microsoft and the Gates Foundation, Bill and Melinda are first and foremost driven to have an impact — on innovation, on people’s lives, and on society as a whole. The building will equip us to expand our impact on all three, with new labs, classrooms, offices, and collaboration spaces that will help us deliver an unparalleled experience to more students and continue pushing the boundaries of our field through research. But that requires more than bricks and mortar — now we have to fill that building with the people who will generate the breakthrough innovations of tomorrow.

Thanks to Bill and Melinda and the more than 300 individual and corporate donors who came together to support our building project, we can now turn our attention to the second phase of the Campaign for CSE: support for the faculty and students who make the Paul G. Allen School great.

As we begin this next phase, I want to give special thanks to Ed Lazowska, whose tireless efforts have enabled us to secure the resources that have transformed us into one of the preeminent computer science programs.  We are extremely grateful to Microsoft President Brad Smith who has provided tremendous leadership on behalf of our volunteer campaign committee. I also want to recognize Paul Beame, Tracy Erbeck, and Aaron Timss for their contributions to the design and construction efforts.  And thanks to each and every one of you for being a vital member of the Allen School community.

You can read more about our latest milestones in the UW News release.

Onward and upward!

Hank

Hello! Best of luck with finals! Two things:

1. The Atrium and reception area will close tomorrow (12/13) starting at 3pm for an event.
2. Our amazing peer advisers have created a guide to 300 level CSE courses! We hope this will be a helpful tool for newer majors. Enjoy! CSE 300-level Course Guide

Dear CSE Ugrads:

Recently, you received an email requesting your participation in a survey for the
Computing Research Association (CRA). If you have not already done so, I encourage
you to complete their brief survey on the experiences of computing students, which will
take no more than 20 minutes to complete.

Should you decide to complete the survey, you will be entered into a raffle for a $100
gift card to Amazon!

If you are interested in completing the survey, please click the link below, or copy and
paste the URL into your internet browser:
https://cerp.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_3UH7q6TmdZ8YRPD

The survey is being conducted by the CRA’s Center for Evaluating the Research Pipeline
(CERP). For more information on CERP, please visit their website: http://cra.org/cerp/.
Many thanks in advance!

~CSE Advising

Fast version: For ugrad or vgrad help, you still email ugrad-advisor@cs or vgrad-advisor@cs but the new ticketing system means we can track things easier

Longer version:

Hey folks!

We are finally ‘modernizing’ and moving to a ticketing system for ugrad and vgrad emails. What does this mean? Well, hopefully, it means there is a less likely chance your email will get lost or misplaced. You should also be able to check in on a message to see if there has been progress made. We hope this will improve your overall customer experience with CSE Advising.

There are a few things YOU can do to help this process move along more easily. First, if you are emailing ugrad-advisor@cs or vgrad-advisor@cs please try to use your @cs email address. If you need to use a gmail or other email account, please include your CSE netID somewhere in the message so that we can more easily link messages to your profile in our ticketing system.

Instead of writing directly to an individual advisor, you might be better served writing to ugrad-advisor@cs and putting ‘Dear “suzy” or whoever your intended recipient is in the first line, and then it will quickly be routed to that person. The benefit of doing things this way is that we will be able to see the full history of questions and answers for students so we’ll have better context in answering your questions. Of course, if you are discussing something you only want an individual advisor to see, you are always still more than welcome to address them directly.

For most routine questions however, we’d like to encourage everyone to use the ugrad-advisor@cs or vgrad-advisor@cs email address.

There will likely be a bit of a transition period when we are all learning to use the new system, but but start of winter we hope this will serve everyone’s needs better.

Crystal & the CSE Advising Team