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        <h1>Dickinson Education and the Computer Science Major</h1>
        <div class="post-meta">March 19, 2024</div>
        <p>The general goals of a Dickinson College Education are to create critical thinking students who are knowledgeable of a broad array of subjects and within their major to provide an education based on the real-world applications of that major. Some of the specific goals of the Computer Science major are to: </p>
        <li>Develop problem solving mastery</li>
        <li>Be prepared for a Computer Science career or graduate program </li>
        <li>Have the ability to work in teams</li>
        <li>Acquire skills necessary to make contributions to open-source projects </li>
        <li>Understand the ethical issues of computing </li>
        <p>This reflection will detail the approaches and successes in helping students achieve these goals from the perspective of a senior Dickinson Computer Science student.        </p>
        <h2>Dickinson Education</h2>
        <p>Dickinson College is a true implementation of the liberal arts model where students must engage with a broad array of subjects to be successful and are supported by professors at a level that cannot be matched at a university. As a student, whether you like it or not, you are required to be versed in a foreign language, study the arts and sciences in some capacity, and be informed about sustainable causes and their importance. These requirements naturally filter out a large number of prospective students and faculty who are preferential to a different educational model. However, the result is a small, committed community of academics at Dickinson who all have something in common. In this way time at Dickinson is a 'get what you give' experience. If you squander this community resource your education may not be compromised but your experience will. The availability of professors and peers who wish to help you achieve your goals is exceptional, but as a student it is your responsibility to engage with these resources. Dickinson College completely delivers on its goals when you, as a student, recognize how to succeed here. This teaches students the valuable lessons that they need to be proactive and that it is okay to ask for and receive help. It took me until college to fully realize that the best student was not whoever knew the most and had the highest test scores but the student who asked the most questions and sought the most help.</p>
        <h2>Computer Science Major</h2>
        <p>The Computer Science Major at Dickinson, in my experience, stresses the importance of goals in the order given above and will be addressed in this order as well. Firstly the goal to develop a problem solving mastery in its students. Every class in the major demands a moderately high level of problem solving that is presented in an approachable fashion. As a result, this is most likely my best developed skill from the Computer Science major, specifically the Computing Abstractions, Operating Systems, and Programming Language Structures courses required a lot of critical thinking and stressed the importance of creating unique solutions. The next goal of the major, preparing students for a career or graduate program, is hard to decisively assess while still being an undergraduate student. I currently do not have plans to attend graduate school and thus have not looked into or applied to any and all of my major-related jobs and research internships have been opportunities found at Dickinson. However, from hearing the stories from a few alumni and according to the data Dickinson touts about its graduate school and career preparedness, this goal is also achieved by almost all of the students that pass through the Computer Science major. The third goal, the ability to work in teams, is perhaps the least facilitated goal that is touted by the major. The 100 and 200 level courses placed a focus on lab partners, which through pair programming and other such partnership paradigms can be incredibly beneficial to both students. However, in my experience i found these relationships to be inevitably one-sided. I have been on both sides of a lab partnership, the one where it feels like your are doing all the work, and the other where you are lost on how to even contribute. In both cases it can be stressful and discouraging and usually results in less learning than if both students had accomplished the task on their own. Perhaps there should be more structure in outlining how students should carry out these partner relationships to prevent this happening more in the future. In higher level lectures (300-400) the focus shifts to group work, which I would consider to be more fruitful overall than partner work. While working in a group can still naturally result in some parties contributing more and some contributing less, there is now potential for students to exercise contribution in more realistic and varied ways. If a student lacks the technical skills to perform a task, they might have the communication skills to organize the group into accomplishing that task in the most effective way. Groups naturally succeed over pairs, in my experience, because they offers students the ability to fill a more specialized role that better utilizes their skills and because decisions can be made collaboratively rather than argued between two people. The final two goals should not be interpreted as unimportant because of their position on this list, rather they should be viewed as capstone goals as these are the last things the major strives to impart on its students before graduation. Beginning with acquiring skills to contribute to open source projects, three semesters of the major are dedicated to this (290, 491, 492), first learning the basics of git and what open source is before practicing on the college's own open-source application FarmData2. The FarmData2 project is another example of the resources available to those who seek it out, it provides a sandbox like approach to real-world coding problems, a thorough introduction to the process of contributing to open-source projects, and provides a direct link to the college farm and its community which provides students with a multitude of opportunities outside the computer science major. Finally, in the capstone classes, students are faced with ethical and legal issues of computing as they contribute to real open-source projects of their choosing. I appreciate that the major provides these two dedicated semesters (491, 492) at the end of a students college career as opportunities to use the skills we have developed and adjust to what a real contribution feels like in the computer science industry. This helps students like myself feel that we are not going to be 'pushed off the deep end' after graduation, we have already interacted with, and in some capacity become a part of, real-world projects that can help springboard us into a career. </p>
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