“It’s a good time to be a CS major!”  This upbeat observation was one of academic advisor Terry Arthur’s favorite ways to encourage students.  (We miss you, Terry!)  The context for this remark was usually the promising employment prospects of our graduates.  But it’s more than that, isn’t it?  It’s always good to be in CS for many reasons!   After almost forty years in and around computer science, I am still grateful every day to participate in such a rich discipline, marked by a unique confluence of analytical precision, theoretical elegance, creative innovation, powerful impact, and broad application.

Of course, it’s still a good time to be a CS major in terms of career opportunities as well.  Many of our alumni have fond memories of the career fairs organized by our corporate partnership program, the Computer Science Resources Consortium (CSRC).    The CSRC continues to play a significant role in the department, under the direction of Laurie Brogdon, Director of External Relations.  Besides two career fairs each year, the CSRC helps connect over seventy companies with CS majors and minors throughout the year, and provides critical support for student activities and scholarships.   The CSRC’s impact can be measured in many ways: last fall the career fair was attended by nearly 1000 students; in a survey of graduating seniors this semester, nearly 90% reported that they have had career-related internships, most with companies in the CSRC;  and the annual university survey of recent graduates always ranks CS graduates near the top in all the usual measures of employment.  So as May commencement draws closer, we trust that our newest alumni will agree that their decision to study CS at Virginia Tech was a very good one!

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Dr. Richard Nance and his wife Barbara will be recognized by the NC State University Libraries (NCSU) as Life Members of the Friends of the Library.  Dr. Nance is an emeritus professor and former department head of Computer Science at Virginia Tech.  NCSU Life Members have made a long standing commitment to helping improve the collections and services of the NCSU Libraries.  Dr. Nance is one of the founding members of the Simulation Archive (http://d.lib.ncsu.edu/computer-simulation/) and continues to serve on the Advisory Board that guides the development and building of the Archive.  As a leader in the field of simulation, Dr. Nance has also contributed to a unique collection of oral history interviews with simulation pioneers.  Dr. Nance and his wife Barbara have also helped to build the Simulation Archive Endowment to enhance and sustain the Archive for generations of students and scholars.  They will be recognized at the annual Friends of the Library Spring Meeting, on Friday, March 31 at the James B. Hunt Jr. Library. The event is a lunch with an exclusive look at upcoming renovations of the D. H. Hill Library and a special viewing of rare books and materials from our Special Collections Research Center. Items from the Simulation Archive will be on view for attendees before the lunch.

He received BSIE and M.S. degrees from N.C. State University in 1962 and 1966 respectively, and the Ph.D. from Purdue University in 1968.  He has served on the faculties of Southern Methodist University and Virginia Tech.  Nance has held research appointments at the Naval Surface Weapons Center and at the Imperial College of Science and Technology (UK) as well as visiting appointments at Old Dominion University and Brunel University (UK).  He was also appointed Visiting Distinguished Honors Professor for the spring semester 1997 at the University of Central Florida. Nance is the author of over 150 papers on discrete event simulation, performance modeling and evaluation, computer networks, and software engineering.  He has held several editorial positions and was the founding Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation (TOMACS).

Nance has consulted for major private businesses and organizations, and his long-term research relationship with the U.S. Navy led to the establishment of the Systems Research Center at Virginia Tech in 1983.  He was named to the John Adolphus Dahlgren Chair in Computer Science in 1988. He was instrumental in the development of the Simulation Archive at N.C. State and currently chairs the advisory committee.  Nance has received several awards for his editorial and professional contributions, most recently the INFORMS Simulation Society Lifetime Professional Achievement Award in 2007.   He was elected a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery in 1996 and a Fellow of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) in 2008.  In 2006 he was recognized by the faculty of the Edward P. Fitts Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering of N.C. State as one of the 12 Distinguished Alumni over the first 75 years of the department’s history.

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Today we are seeing a large spike in undergraduate computer science enrollment.  There have been two previous spikes in CS, one in the late 80’s (following the debut of the PC) and one in the early 2000’s (the “dot com boom”).  So here we go again?  Is this another enrollment bubble?  This one feels different to me.  While the current growth rate will surely level out, I believe CS enrollments will be sustainably high for the foreseeable future.  Computing is just so pervasive, and a CS degree is such good preparation for deep computational thinking and creative problem solving—exactly what is needed to address virtually all of the most important problems and opportunities society faces today.  And as we make progress on broadening participation in our field to include historically under-represented groups, the potential for new talent and growth is even more exciting.

Here are a few numbers, to give you a sense of CS undergraduate enrollment trends at Virginia Tech.  This year we will award almost 250 bachelor’s degrees, our largest group ever, and almost twice the size of the class that graduated only four years ago.  Our current sophomore class numbers 341, a number which ranks second in the College of Engineering, trailing only Mechanical Engineering.  The average GPA of this group is an impressive 3.37.

We are thrilled at the number of talented students that are streaming into our field!  It is a great privilege to help the next generation build on what has come before.  In a future post, I’ll have more to say about the great jobs our students are moving into, and about the exciting growth we are experiencing in other dimensions of the department.

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