- Welcome to the Department
of Computer Science
and Networking at Wentworth
Institute of Technology
and most importantly welcome
for our accepted students day!
Obviously this is a virtual session.
So I hope you enjoy this.
Get a little bit of
information about our programs,
about Wentworth, about
our students and faculty.
I wanna start by talking
about a couple of things
related to our department
that I think are important
for you to understand.
First, our department is the
largest department on campus
in terms of the number of
students in our majors.
And Computer Science in particular is
one of the largest majors on campus.
We also have our major
in computer networking
and our newest major in cyber security.
I'll be talking about
all three of those today.
All three of these are growing in terms
of the number of students
and because of that we've been
hiring lots of new faculty.
In fact, two new faculty
started with us this year.
Those two faculty bring expertise
in areas we didn't have before.
And/or extend that expertise in new ways.
For example, one of our new faculty
is an expert in artificial intelligence.
Another focus is very clearly
in things like program and languages,
and data structures, and algorithms.
Really core computer science
technologies and principles.
We've been offering lots of new courses
in the last several years.
And all of these courses
are somehow offering
new opportunities for
our students to expand
into new areas of computing.
I'll call out a couple here.
One of them is a brand new course
in Quantum Computing for Security.
Quantum computing is a
really brand new field
for us in computer science
it's still a developing
at a very rapid pace.
In particular, one of the
main concerns about quantum
is how that's going to impact
security that we all rely on
to protect our web connections and our
you know, Twitter
connections, and Facebook,
and all of our emails and texts.
And so one of our faculty
who's been learning a lot
about quantum has developed
a brand new course
in quantum computing and security.
Another faculty member
has a lot of experience
in artificial intelligence
and he's developed
a brand new class in embedded
artificial intelligence.
Looking at how we take techniques from AI
and machine learning and run
them on special purpose devices
that aren't the same as
what we typically use.
So most times when we're
using AI and machine learning
these are running on big servers,
somewhere often in a data center somewhere
with more or less unlimited resources.
But we're seeing AI applied
more and more in devices
that we carry around with us every day.
That don't have the same amount of power.
That don't literally have
as much battery power
to spend on these kind of
very complicated calculations.
So it's really constraining
AI and related techniques
to run on devices like
headphones and other things.
Where you can't do the traditional thing
and have it make sense.
This particular class is actually
a collaboration with Bose.
Where students are working
on projects from Bose
where they're thinking specifically
about their headphones.
Another new class we're offering this year
is artificial intelligence for games.
So this is using AI techniques also
but applied in the context
of game development.
Of course a lot of students
get into computer science
because they're interested
in game development.
It turns out creating games
is significantly harder
than playing games just FYI
all of you out there
thinking about, you know,
going into game development.
But it's a really interesting field
to apply computer science techniques,
and ideas and principles.
And using AI to build more complex,
more interesting, more
intricate AI systems for games
is actually an amazing challenge
and something that a lot of
our students love to work on.
Our newest major in cyber
security launched last year.
So this is a new program, Bachelor Degree,
Bachelor of Science in Cyber Security.
We're extremely excited about it.
It's something we've worked on for years.
Until we finally felt that
we were ready to launch it.
Also done in very close
collaboration with industry.
We worked with about
20 different companies
who gave us feedback on the degree program
to make sure that it
was producing students
that were ready to go join the workforce.
Which I'll come back to in a few minutes.
Lastly, we are accredited
by both ABET and NECHE
accredits all universities in New England.
And then ABET is a program
specific accreditation
for computing and engineering programs.
To be ABET accredited, we have
to show that we're constantly
evaluating and improving our
programs and our courses.
And I gotta tell ya, this is so important
in computer science and related fields.
It changes so fast.
Everything we're learning today
applies to what we do in the future.
But the particular tools
and skills and techniques
are gonna change over time.
And so by being accredited,
we have external validation, if you will,
that we are keeping our
programs up to date.
Everything we do here is
focused on getting students
all the experiences they need
to get the best jobs they
can when they graduate.
We're here to help our students graduate
with the right skills.
So that they can get jobs right away
making really good money.
And most universities don't
really think that way.
We do that here through
two specific means.
First, is our co-op program.
I'll say a few words about that later
although there will be plenty
of resources for you to watch
and read online about our
co-op program as well.
And the second is what
we do in our classrooms
which is a focus on real world projects.
And what I mean by that
is we want our students
working on the kind of
projects and assignments
that look like what they would work on
when they're working in industry.
That's really how Wentworth functions.
It's all about giving
students that practical,
useful experience so they have the skills
to get the job they want
right out of college.
But also a foundation for
a whole 50 year career
in the field.
In computer science, you're
gonna spend four years
learning how to create new programs.
It's all about creating new
software to solve problems
of a variety of different types
using lots of different program
and languages and tool sets.
And in computer science,
over those four years,
you're gonna progress
from working on smaller,
sort of simpler, you know,
one person assignments.
To larger teams, to larger projects.
And by the end you'll be working in teams
on just one day projects for
an entire semester course.
But as we go through these,
in all of your classes,
you're gonna be working
on these kinds of projects
that give you a chance to really dive deep
into the particular language
or tool that you're using.
One example in particular
is using encryption systems
to learn how to do very
low level programming.
I think it's important to note,
that in computer science,
we use literally hundreds
or thousands of different
programming languages all the time
and all these different
programming languages
have different pros and cons.
Many languages we use,
are called high-level languages,
things like JAVA, or C++,
or Python, or Seashark,
many of you are probably familiar
with some of these languages.
What makes them high level,
is that those languages can express
relatively complicated ideas
in a line or two of code.
I use the example often that if you
think about making a sandwich, right,
well if I wanted someone
to make a sandwich
I would say hey could you
please go make me a sandwich.
And probably I don't have to
tell you any more than that
if you're watching this video.
You would know how to go make a sandwich
without any further instruction.
Lower level languages
are not so expressive.
They're harder to
express complicated ideas
and typically require many,
many more lines of code
to say the same thing.
The lowest level of programming
language you can have
is assembly language, right?
And in assembly, if we go
back to the sandwich example,
an assembly it's not even as
simple as oh, go to the kitchen
and get out a knife and some bread.
No, no, no, an assembly would be, okay,
from wherever you are sitting right now
watching this video, stand up, right,
rotate 90 degrees to the left.
Move your chair back.
Pick up your right leg forward.
Move your right leg three inches forward,
set your right leg down.
Right?
That level of instruction
is kind of like assembly.
So just for a moment, imagine
you're sitting somewhere
right now watching this video,
how long it would take
me to walk you through
all of the steps at that level
to be able to go make a sandwich.
We would probably all
starve to death first.
So this kind of programming
language is a real challenge.
And in particular the
way we write code in it
isn't really like what
we look like in something
like a JAVA or a C++
and so it takes students
a long time to learn how to do it well.
Every student at Wentworth
learns a little bit of this
kind of programming
because it's good to know
at least a little bit about how it works
even if you're never really gonna write
that kind of code yourself.
For students who want to know more.
We offer an entire work
in assembly language.
In this course, students always do
one big semester long project.
On top of their smaller
assignments to show
that they really actually
understand assembly.
After all, I could have you code up
calculators and spreadsheets
until the cows come home
and you're not actually
gonna learn assembly
until you actually work
on something complicated
and challenging that makes you wanna
smash your laptop into a thousand pieces
'cause it ain't working right.
That's when you really
learn how to do that thing
and in particular how to
learn something like assembly.
So in this case, students
very commonly choose
to replicate a particular device.
Which is the enigma machine.
This particular device is
actually World War II era device
that was used to encrypt messages.
Very much like we all do
today on our cell phones.
Right?
Most of you have a smart
phone in your pocket.
And every little bit of information
leaving your smart phone
is sent by an antenna
that broadcasts it.
And everybody with another antenna
which is everybody with a smart phone,
can overhear everything
that's leaving your phone.
So we encrypt those
messages before we send them
to make sure that even though I
or someone else can hear them,
we can't understand them.
The enigma system is one
that was used in World War II
to encrypt messages being sent to folks
like out in the ocean in
particular by the German military.
This device is a complicated,
electromechanical device
with lots of moving parts and rotors
that turned into an amazing
system for encryption.
That the allies had a really
hard time cracking that code.
I would spend the next 10
minutes talking about this
but you could probably find
a better video on YouTube
or go read the Wikipedia article,
it's totally worth your time.
Instead, all I'll say is in this class,
students replicate this entire device.
the entire enigma system from
the ground up in assembly
and it's amazing.
Most students would
have trouble doing this
in a high level language.
Doing something like assembly is amazing.
Last time we ran this course
I think the students just didn't sleep
for three weeks at the end of
the semester to get it done
but they did!
And at the end of that, two
important things happened.
One they knew assembly.
Obviously.
Clearly, demonstrably.
Two, it gave these
students an amazing chance
to talk about themselves when
they went on an interview
for a co-op or for a full time job.
And as many of you know,
one of the hardest things
about getting a job is getting through
the interview process.
Getting that job is all about
being able to sell yourself
and talk about yourself.
And if you can talk about this one project
in this one class that you completed
it's gonna give you that
in to start talking about
things that you've done.
In fact it's quite likely some smug
software engineer is
gonna say "oh, yeah right,
I see assembly on your resume.
Who knows assembly?"
And you're gonna say,
"Whoa, wait a minute.
Let me tell you all about
what I know about assembly."
and you'll spend 15 minutes
talking about one project.
Right?
So not only are we choosing projects
that help students understand the material
and learn what we want them to learn.
It's all about giving
them that extra skill
to help them get that job.
If computer science is all
about developing new software,
computer networking is about mostly using
existing tools, existing
software, existing hardware,
existing tool sets to
build functioning systems.
And most of you think about something like
information technology or IT departments.
So it's keeping everything running
so everyone can log in
and check their email
and do all the work they need to do.
All right it's the job of
computer networking professionals
to keep all of those
systems up and running
safely, securely, 24/7.
There's also a little bit
of programming involved.
Creating new code to glue
bits of things together
that don't quite fit right.
Or to do some light analysis,
those sorts of things.
But mostly it's about building systems
out of existing tools
hardware and software.
In particular, one of the classes we offer
is data center networking.
And in this class, students
work in teams of three.
And for the entire semester,
each team is given a full
rack of computer equipment.
A bunch of routers and
switches and servers
and that's their rack of
equipment for the entire semester.
They own everything about it.
They do all the hardware
all of the cabling.
They do all of the software
all of the virtualization.
They have to take it from nothing.
Just a pile of hardware and wires.
It's completely unconnected.
Uninstalled, no software, no nothing.
All the way to a fully
functioning data center
that you will see in any modern
hardware environment today.
So you think about a Facebook
or a Google or an Amazon,
they're replicating that
in miniature of course.
Because a real data center's gonna have
hundreds of thousands or
even millions of systems.
And here we've only got a few on one rack.
But all of the principles apply.
And in particular,
students learn about really
three things in this class.
Right?
Security, obviously that's important
for everybody these days.
Every one of these student racks
is connected to the public internet
and they have to protect it from day one.
Following all best
practices and do it right.
The great news is, there's
nothing on this system.
It's isolated from the
rest of our network.
There's no data here
so if mistakes are made
and somehow someone does exploit a problem
in that infrastructure, it's okay,
there's nothing there
and we can shut it off real quick.
Second thing, is about scalability.
Because in a data center environment
you have to make sure you can always
scale up your resources, add more servers,
add more networking
equipment, add more bandwidth.
Whatever it might be.
And if you've designed a system
where you reach a ceiling
and you can't scale up
to handle more users or more traffic
then you've got a real problem.
So we have to think about scalability
from the ground up.
And then of course high availability.
No environment today can go offline.
You have to make sure you
have redundant backups
and all kinds of things in place
so that if one thing fails,
a wire, a router, a
switch, a server, whatever,
the entire network has
to keep functioning.
And so students build over 15 weeks,
this entire environment on their own
and it weaves together all sorts of pieces
from what they've learned on their co-ops
and in their classes to
really build something
that gives them concrete
skills to help them
get amazing great jobs
right out of school.
So next, I'd like to convince you
that our approach here works.
So quick reminder, what's the approach?
We're here to help our
students get the best jobs
they can get when they graduate.
And we do that through real world projects
in the classroom as I
described previously.
And through our co-op program.
Again, I'm not gonna say a lot about co-op
because there'll be other videos
and resources for you to look at.
But spoiler alert, the co-op program,
the most important thing
about a Wentworth education.
If you ask any Wentworth
student why did you come here?
Nine times out of 10 the answer will be
because of the co-op program.
If you ask a Wentworth alumni
what's the most important
thing that you did
while you were at Wentworth?
99 times out of 100, the co-op program.
If you look at our alumni,
the numbers support,
that what we're dong here actually works.
And in particular,
we do what most
universities do these days.
Which is you send out a
survey to all of your alumni.
Usually about six months
after they graduate.
And you ask them, are you employed?
If so where?
How much money are you making?
What's your job title?
Are you in graduate school?
If so, where?
To get a feel for how
successful our students are.
With the 2018 graduating class,
which is the most recent data we have,
within six months of graduating,
99% of our computer science alumni,
were fully employed in
a computer science job
or in graduate school.
And for Wentworth, it's 1% in grad school.
98% are working full time in the industry.
Students come here because
they know they wanna get a job.
If you do come here and
you decide you wanna go
to grad school, great!
We'll help you do that.
We'll help you make the right decisions.
Take the right electives and so on.
But most of our students come here
because they wanna get a job.
Of those 99% who are fully employed
in a computer science job,
the median starting salary
for computer science alumni
from 2018 was 72,000.
Median, you take all
the salaries reported,
list them from highest to lowest,
you pick the one in the middle.
So for those of you thinking
about return on investment,
72,000 is a good number to think about
three, four, five years from now
it's probably gonna be closer to 75.
In computer networking, within
six months of graduating,
we had a 100% placement rate.
Again, working in jobs or in grad school.
With a lower median starting salary
this year of about 60,000.
Usually the networking
numbers are a little lower.
We have seen three to five
years out from graduation
the numbers tend to
normalize a little bit.
One very important note
about this set of data.
And it's important that you
can interpret this correctly.
You'll see also that a long with
these numbers I've given you
we list our response rate.
This tells you how many of
the alumni from this class
responded to the survey.
So let's call it about
60% or three out of five.
So about three out of five students
responded to our alumni survey.
That means two out of five didn't.
And for those two out of five who didn't,
I can't tell you anything because
they didn't respond to the survey.
So importantly understand that the numbers
you see in front of you
are based on the students that responded.
Here's a list of a few of the places
where our students got jobs.
Again this is for the
2018 graduating class
broken down by computer science
and computer networking.
Note that there are no cyber
security students listed here
because we haven't graduated
those students yet.
We're only in the sophomore year
for those students right now.
There's a couple of
different kind of sectors
that our students go in to.
A lot of students go in to general
sort of web and mobile
development kind of positions.
So you know places like
Snapchat for example,
these are students going
and creating web apps
and mobile apps for various kinds.
We see students go in to traditional
computer science and computing companies,
so Dell EMC hires a lot of our students
in its various corporations
and subsidiaries.
We see a lot of students going
to places like Amazon Robotics or Bose.
Going to do interesting
projects to work for them.
We see a lot of students going to places
like MIT Lincoln Lab.
MIT and Lincoln Lab is kind of
a RND arm of MIT if you will.
And they hire dozens of
our students every year
for co-ops and full time.
Which of course at Wentworth
makes us feel great
that MIT is hiring our students to come
and run their infrastructure
and write their code
and solve their problems for them.
Because our students know how to do it
which is pretty great.
We also see a lot of students
going into cyber security jobs already.
For example, in this graduating
class we had one student
who did a co-op at a three letter agency
in the Washington D.C. area.
Got a job offer from that same agency
but ended up taking job
offer from the US government
in particular in the state department
where she wasn't allowed to
report to us her job title.
So
take that for what that's worth.
But also companies like Cyber Ark
hire a lot of our students.
Kaspersky and there's many
that hire students to come
and work doing cyber
security type of work.
On the networking side,
similarly, cyber security jobs
but also jobs going to
run the infrastructure.
So places like Bain Capital.
Or IBM.
Akamai is another really
fascinating company.
You should probably go read about.
They hire tons of our students every year
for co-op and full time.
Akamai probably has you know helped
get your data to your phone or computer
in the last couple of hours
and you just don't know it.
Fascinating company and well
worth your time to read into.
This is just a snapshot
of some of the companies.
If you're interested
in diving into the data
we very proudly publish
all of this data online.
Go to co-ops and careers, all spelled out,
.wit.edu and you can find the
most recent graduating reports
the last four years and you
can dive in to the data.
You can say I wanna look at
all computer science grads
from 2018 see where they worked,
what their job titles were,
that kind of information.
Please dig in and if you have questions,
don't hesitate to reach out to us.
In summary, just a few things
I'd like to highlight one last time.
Most importantly, Wentworth is here
to help our students get
the best jobs they can get
when they graduate and to set them up
for a whole successful
career in the field.
And we do that through real
world projects in the classroom
and through our co-op program.
Where every student does at
least two semesters of co-op
and most do three which gives you
an enormous amount of
experience on your resume
before you even graduate from college.
At Wentworth, everything we
do is focused on our students.
And what I mean when I say that is,
we celebrate our student successes.
We're here as a teaching school.
And faculty come here
to be in the classroom with our students.
We don't have TAs every class,
every lecture, every lab
is taught by a faculty member,
never by another student.
All of the decisions we make are around
is this going to improve
the student experience?
The faculty are here to support that.
And so yeah we get excited
when faculty publish a paper
or something like that
but really, it's great,
now how about we think
about the classroom again.
We really get excited
when our students succeed.
When they get great jobs or
move on to graduate school.
Or if they do something
awesome like publish a paper
or present at a conference.
Then we get really excited.
That's when we know that we have succeeded
as an institute and as faculty here.
And so with all of this together
what it comes down to is
Wentworth is the place for you
if you're thinking about getting a job.
You're interested in
getting the skills you need
to be prepared to get that first job
and the second job and the third job.
It's focused on the majors
in the science and technology
and engineering fields
including computer science and
so as a smaller institution
you have all the benefits
of smaller institutions,
smaller class sizes and so on.
For example, all of our classes are capped
at about 25 students in a class.
And again, every lecture and lab is taught
by a faculty member.
You're never gonna have a lecture hall
with hundreds of students
as with so many schools
'cause that's not how we
think students learn best.
And lastly again, every
student is going to be
learning those skills in
their particular programs
in a computer science and
networking and cyber security
that's gonna mean even in lecture time
you're gonna be out on your
laptops following along
writing code, logging into systems.
Because that's how you're
really gonna learn.
So, if you have any questions at all
about anything you've heard today
or if anything else comes up
not related to this presentation
that you would like an answer to
please don't hesitate to
reach out to me anytime.
My contact information will be available
along with this video.
Shoot me an email, give me a phone call,
whatever you need, I'm happy
to answer those questions.
And if I don't know the
answer, I'll put you in touch
with the right person.
Thank you so much for your time.
I hope you enjoyed the video.
Have a wonderful day.
- The Computer Science program is
one our most popular
majors here at Wentworth.
As you can imagine, students who graduate
from these programs are in
high demand by employers.
We encourage you to reach
out with any questions
by contacting our admissions office.
The deposit deadline is
just around the corner.
We look forward to welcoming
you here this fall.
