CS Undergraduate Recruiting Committee Agenda
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
9:15 a.m. to 10:30 a.m.
DC 2314
Committee Members: Ashraf Aboulnaga, Peter van Beek (ex officio Undergraduate Admissions), Shai Ben-David, Dan Brown (ex officio Director of First Year), Sandy Graham, Mark Giesbrecht (Chair), Tian Kou, Kate Larson, Naomi Nishimura (ex officio Director of Undergraduate Studies), Troy Vasiga.
- Access to CS courses for high school students.
A recommendation of the Undergraduate Recruiting Strategy report was to facilitate and encourage local high school students to take first year CS courses. To this end Mark has met with Rae Crossman (who serves as a liaison with the Waterloo Catholic School Board, runs the UCEP program, and is involved in Waterloo Unlimited) and spoken with registrar Ken Lavigne. Courses potentially available to high school students are CS133 and CS135, though we may allow only one.
We need to discuss a number of issues including prerequisites, offering times, fees, and advertising.
- Undergraduate CS Poster.
Posters are to be developed for both Undergraduate and Graduate CS recruiting. We will be working with graphics services in the design of these posters. It will be useful to develop some contents requirements:
Possible Text:
- Full name of school
- Contact info/web address
- Mission statement, if available and not too long
- Catchy description, words/phrases: "CS is everywhere", "Leaders of Tomorrow", "Build the Future", "Shape the Future", ...
- Students working/discussing (at least one female).
- Students and profs discussing
- Interesting software displyed on screen, and/or I/O device (graphics, HCI, ...)
- Davis Centre
- UW logo
- Survey of the Recruitment Effort (Questionnaire)
It would be extremely useful to find out what attributes of UW CS and what communication from UW and CS in particular is reaching and attracting our incoming students. A possible mechanism is a simple survey of first year students in Computer Science.
A starting point for a questionaire to send to all first year CS students is as follows. Please consider the suitability of the survey, of these questions, and any other questions which may be useful.
The David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science is examining its efforts in attracting recruiting students for its Undergraduate program. Your answers to the following questions will help us to determine our future efforts in recruitment. Your answers are completely confidential and will in no way be tied to your name. This survey should take only a few minutes to complete. Thank you very much for your input. We hope it will help in improving our school and your future fellow students.- Where did you hear about Computer Science at Waterloo for the first time?
- What grade were you in when you heard about Computer Science at Waterloo for the first time?
- What grade were you in when you decided to study Computer Science in university?
- What is the most attractive feature of the School of Computer Science at Waterloo that caught your attention?
- Where did you get further detailed information about Computer Science at Waterloo after you heard about us?
- What was the most helpful part of your communication with the University of Waterloo prior to your accepting to come to Waterloo?
- What was the least helpful, confusing or problematic part of your communication with the University of Waterloo prior to your accepting to come to Waterloo?
- You are a citizen, or a permanent residence of: (if you are a Canadian, please give region – details see below.)
- Your background in Computer Science is (none, Grade 11 CS, Grade 12 CS)
This project has received ethics clearance through the Office of Research Ethics at UW. Please contact the office at 519-888-4567 ext. ??? if you have any questions or concerns.
- Letter from the Director to accepted applicants.
- These will be mailed out with Tamer's signature in Feb. 2007.
- There will be three batches incrementally.
- We need to decide on which brochure to include in the letter: red vs. gold (higher cost).
