The Power of Alumni

There are lots of reasons why Ship's CS and Engineering programs are strong, but today I am thankful for alumni.

Help For Our Programs

Last Friday we had our bi-annual Industrial Advisory Council (IAC) meeting and I ALWAYS come out of them energized!  Our IAC is made up of alumni and is tasked with helping us keep our program current so that our students are well-sought after when they graduate.  We talk to them about EVERYTHING: curriculum, extra-curricular activities, enrollments, budgets, etc.  And, as part of our assessment process, they review student projects giving broad feedback to the faculty about curriculum and giving individual coaching to the students.

I am sure it is obvious why the IAC is really valuable to us, but this time was unique.  Evidence of their impact can be seen in my todo list when they left.  These are but a few of the action items I got from them:

• Add ethics objectives (which they formulated) to each of the Engineering Seminars
• Share a google drive folder with them so that we can collaborate between meetings
• Share a google drive folder with seniors' resumes so they can help our students find jobs
• Gather some different statistics from our enrollment data so they can help us analyze how some admissions changes are affecting our enrollments
• Give one member access to our servers so he can set up a tool the software engineering students should be using
• Create a new student club tasked with sponsoring events like: resume workshops, outside speakers (with many IAC volunteers), job shadowing (with many IAC volunteers).
• Create a sub-committee of the IAC tasked with find a way to help our female students thrive in a male-dominated freshman experience.

The most amazing thing for me this time is that my action items aren't all "Carol go do something" items.  Many of the tasks I got were "Set up something so someone on the IAC can do something valuable."  They have always given us great help during our meetings - this time, they committed to helping us all year log.  Wow!

Help For Our Students

In addition to the big, program-related help, alumni can have incredible influence when they interact with our students.  Last week we had the Great T-Shirt Giveway where we give every student a shirt that our alumni pay for.  The alumni come back and hand out the shirts as a way of saying, "You are now part of a community.  You can do this and be successful like I am."  That can be a very powerful message for freshman this time of year.

I always try to arrange a speaker for this even and this year we had an alumnus, Sarah Joseph, give a talk on "The Value of the Struggle."  We have been talking with our students a lot about persisting when things are hard and Sarah is a GREAT example of someone who worked hard and, as a result, has built a successful career with the Department of Defense.  Her talk was right on point and incredibly valuable. (I wish I had filmed it!) As evidence of its power, a group of students stayed after to talk with her until I had to kick them out because we lost the room. 

Help for Specific Courses

This semester, alumni are also helping us create a new and exciting class:  Interdisciplinary Development.  The goal is for our students to work with students outside of our department to build something those students need.  For our first try, we are working with Ship's yearbook committee to build a website version of the yearbook.  This must be exciting for alumni, too, because I have been helped by multiple alumni in looking for the right development tools and process for this course.  All of my helpers have been supportive in helping me pick technologies and I have been impressed that they are being sensitive to the pedagogic goals of the course.   It will be a MUCH better course because they have taken the time to consult with me about so many possibilities.

Bottom Line

Almost every time an alumnus comes campus and engages with either faculty or students, the benefit is amazing.  I am so grateful that "Ship Family" includes our alumni because they are a significant part of the reason our programs are successful.

A Strike

This week, our faculty union went on strike to protect the quality of our institutions.  In particular, the Chancellor's office was attacking adjunct faculty (trying to put them at a lower pay scale and raise the percent of adjuncts we should hire) and tenure (they were trying to be able to retrench without regard to seniority and to move us between institutions without discussion with the receiving institution).

Engineers don't strike, so I really had no context for how to deal with this.  However, I agreed with the principles the union was fighting for and I trust my colleagues who lead the union.  We were on strike for three days and it was eye opening.

I learned that I have colleagues across this institution that I have never met and we agree on so many things.  I knew they were there, but they weren't really real to me before this.  I have a new interdisciplinary connection to this institution that I will work to remember.

I learned that our students are INCREDIBLE!  They backed us by bringing us food (a bbq with burgers and dogs for everyone and more donuts, cookies and coffee than we could consume).  They backed us by marching with us.  They backed us in they way they spoke to the media, the Chancellor, and the Governor.  They backed me personally with private messages of support, too.

I learned that, together, we can change the tone of this institution.  When Dr. Cedia was our president, he would talk about the "Ship Family" and everyone knew exactly what he meant.  We stood together against the pressures from the state and took care of each other when things were difficult.  Our students clearly understand "Ship Family" even though Dr. Cedia is gone and our current administration doesn't seem to really embrace that term.  Having been reminded, I don't believe our faculty will let go of that very soon.  The student are our allies and they took care of us as much as we try to take care of them.

I hope that the institution recovers quickly and that we can move forward with a renewed commitment to Ship Family.

Testing for Code Structure

Our students learn to use Test-Driven Development in CS1, so they are pretty good at writing tests by the time they are in our upper division courses.  This week, in my Large Scale Architecture class we hit on a different kind of testing that they hadn't seen before: testing the structure of the code.

We were studying the Lazy Load pattern and ran into this quote in the text: "The most intrusive elements of ghosts is that every accessor needs to be modified so that it will trigger a load if the object actually is a ghost." [Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by Martin Fowler]  That quote generated a great discussion when we asked these questions:

• What happens if you forget that in a getter?
• What happens if you forget that in a setter?
• How does inheritance affect that?

In the end, we decided that this represented a pretty big risk, so I asked the students if they could write a JUnit test that, given a class, could verify that all of the getters called the load function. (I left out testing setters because they have the additional challenge of passing the right type of object into them.)

After some discussion, the students wrote a "verifier" class that uses reflection to find all of the getters in a given class that extends a Ghost class, calls each one and makes sure that each one has the side effect of calling a load method.  This has two significant questions:

1. Should you test inherited getters?  The answer is yes, but then you also inherit the getClass() method, so you have to handle it separately
2. How do you check if the load method is called?  This one is a bit harder.  The solution they came up with was to make a mock class that extended the class under test overriding the load method.  The overriding method would either set a boolean or increment a counter when it was called.  The JUnit test could use the verifier to call all of the getters on the mock class and verify that the load method was called correctly.

I like this lesson because it shows the students that we can use JUnit tests to test the structure of the code in addition to testing its behavior.  That allows us to put in place safety nets that catch us when we forget things like "every accessor has to call the load method." 

What a useful class period that one was!

Getting Ready for the Next Phase

Getting Ready for the Next Phase

This is my twentieth year as a faculty member and my fifteenth year as a department chair.  This summer I emptied my office and redecorated because it is time for a new beginning.  I have always loved this job, but I don't want to let it become a mindless habit.  I enjoy thinking about how I approach my job, my students, my faculty, and my administration.

So, to help make sure that I don't lose that focus, the goal of this blog is to help me remember to pay attention to the details even though I have done them for so long.  Perhaps there is still a better way for me to present material, design assignments, grade exams, assess my classes, revise the curriculum, negotiate for budgets and staff, etc.