Meeting with Dean Rhodes at Unc About Computer Science Funding

After meeting with some professors in the CS department, it became clear that they were severely underfunded and it was affecting how many new students could take CS classes. I saw this as especially bad, because it was likely that the people who were going to become discouraged first were women and other under-represented minorities in tech. So I asked my contact in the IT department if she could get me a meeting with the Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, Terry Rhodes, if she could reconsider.

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She really thought I was a musician or an artist. 

- [ ] When I was an incoming freshman, spent 7 hours. 


I came to visit the CS department a couple months ago to visit with old professors. They told me that they’ve been having a ton of trouble with funding. I asked what I could do, and was told I should talk to you. 


- [ ] 1. It was the marriage of the arts and computer science that made Coursicle successful. Computer science people tend to focus only on functionality. 
- [ ]           Technology needs to be humanized. It’s not enough to create a cool app – you have to ask what it’s for, and whose needs it serves. I see this in San Francisco. We need more people who have an interest in people going into CS. More people in CS who care about people first, not Tech first. 
- [ ]          A product built with huge attention to detail and care sticks with people, in the same way a song from one’s childhood resonates with them, and they look back fondly at a moment when they heard that song, people look back fondly at the products that made an impact on them.



- [ ] 2. Computer science can assist other fields as well. When I was a freshman, one of my friends at Harvard was doing research that you helped scrape data for was looking at the impact that compensation of British slaveowners in the mid-19th century had on the British economy.
- [ ]      Basically allowing by research that wouldn’t have been possible without scraping. It would have taken her months of manually collecting that data, which at that point there would have been other research she could have done that would have been better. 



- [ ] 3. Jobs. We need more people who are prepared to work at Coursicle. Of the 5 people we’ve hired so far, 3 of them have been UNC CS majors. 
- [ ]      But it’s not just about how many. It’s about who. The other two from other schools have been women, from other schools. We haven’t had a single woman candidate apply from UNC in CS. 
- [ ]      One of our 3 primary missions is having full gender equity at Coursicle. 
- [ ]     I think that the more barriers exist to trying CS, the more self selection will happen. That means the fewer people who look like me, straight white cisgender males, are going to be in CS at UNC. 



- [ ] Overall, I think UNC has an incredible potential to be a place where computer science specifically is merged with the humanities and social sciences. That’s not because UNC is strong in CS, it’s because it’s strong in the humanities and social sciences. 



The fund for students working on company


- [ ] Offer to talk to faculty about value in SILS
- [ ] Send him the summary I sent to Dean Rhodes






* Meeting with UNC Provost / Dean

    * Marriage of arts and CS that made Coursicle so successful. 

    * Story about helping Ellora scrape the slave data.

    * Technology needs to be humanized. It’s not enough to create a cool app – you have to ask what it’s for, and whose needs it serves.

    * Could mention that I can talk to someone at the State Legislature if that would help, try to get more funding. 

    * Read through all of the conversation with Matt and come up with a “CS helps the humanities” argument, and maybe a “poor students are helped by CS” argument. He mentioned NYTimes study on economic mobility by college.

    * A product built with huge attention to detail and care sticks with people, in the same way a song from one’s childhood resonates with them, and they look back fondly at a moment when they heard that song, people look back fondly at the products that made an impact on them.

    * Find a student who really benefited from getting into first year class

    * Talk to state legislature / find groups working on this on higher level

    * CS profs cost twice as much

    * Limiting how many courses CS students can take 2 classes per semester 

    * primary bottleneck is the professors this time, not teaching assistants.