Welcome back to all of our returning students, and welcome to all those students new to campus and/or new to studying CS at Carleton! I hope your summer was adventurous or restorative or whatever you needed it to be.
I’m a big believer that September is the other January, and just like in January, I enjoy making new (academic) year’s resolutions. As chair, I’ve also been thinking about my resolutions for our department and the CS community here at Carleton for 2025-2026. I thought I’d share them with you here today.
- Continue to build welcoming, open spaces and community within the department, whether that’s in the classroom, in the labs and study spaces, during department events like Bits & Bytes, or just hanging around casually with others. Our welcome extends to all, whether you’re taking your first CS course or your 10th CS course, whether you intend to major or whether you’re studying CS on your own terms.
- Thoughtfully examine, explore, and discuss the role of AI tools within our many contexts. Maybe you’re happily experimenting with AI tools and enthusiastic about the possibilities. Maybe you feel existential dread about the ethical and environmental impacts of generative AI. Or maybe you don’t know what to think. (That’s where I am, currently.) Wherever you are, you’re not alone! We have a group of CS faculty focusing this year on what the AI boom means for the CS department and for Carleton. I’m advising a Comps group who will make recommendations on whether and how to incorporate AI tools and skills into CS 257 (Software Design). These are just a few examples of how we’re engaging in conversations about AI in the department. I want all of us to feel free to share our thoughts, ideas, experiments, and worries about AI together, and look forward to formal and informal conversations about AI with you all this year.
- Continue to collect and analyze data about what, and how, we’re doing as a department. Last year we collected data on various aspects of department life, including attendance at our weekly Bits & Bytes events and the experiences of our newly declared and graduating majors. This data collection and analysis is part of a 2-year strategic plan we developed in the spring of 2024 to assess our strengths as a department and where we could improve as a department. I’ll share some of the stories from the data with you this year, and we’ll continue to ask for your participation in data collection. Thank you so much in advance for your input!
I hope you find yourself at home on 3rd Olin this year! I look forward to seeing you in the classrooms, in the labs and study spaces, at department events, and in the hallways. I’m always interested to hear from you, so please feel free to reach out to me with questions, concerns, observations, ideas, or just to say hi. You can reach me at adalal@carleton.edu, or in Olin 301B.
Happy school year!
— Amy Csizmar Dalal, CS Department Chair