Interdisciplinary Computer Science at Mills

Note from Ellen Spertus:

As some of you know, I direct a unique graduate program in Interdisciplinary Computer Science at Mills College (Oakland, California). Most of our students (and faculty) are women. It works well as a "reentry" program for women (or men) who majored in something else in college and want to switch into CS or interdisciplinary work. One of our students, who had majored in Anthropology in college, is doing an internship at Livermore Lab and is about to start in a top CS PhD program, with a NSF fellowship. Another student, with a background in labor organizing, recently completed a thesis on using the Internet for feminist consciousness raising and has found related employment. You can read more about the program, including seeing a paper that Sheila Humphreys and I wrote for SIGCSE's special issue on women and computing.

Anyway, we're holding an open house on Thursday, August 19, 4:30-6:30. Please forward this announcement to people who might be interested. Our students tend to be people who have worked in tech writing, QA, system administration, web design, or tech support and only discovered after college that they had an interest and talent in computing.

People not in degree programs can also take classes at Mills (for a fee, perhaps paid for by a company). One of the more interesting offerings this fall is Network Security, taught by Prof. Almudena Konrad. Next semester, I'll be teaching a course on Information Retrieval Systems, inspired by my sabbatical work at Google.