Last summer, he had a software engineering role at Khan Academy, the open-education company, working alongside full-time engineers on the Frontend Infrastructure team, where he built new user-interface components, fixed bugs and wrote documentation on his changes.
But not everyone starts out knowing they might be interested in a future in computer science.
“I was studying biochemistry and wanted to go to med school; but after my experiences in the emergency department, I realized that medicine wasn’t for me.
in Bioinformatics, a joint program with the Heersink School of Medicine and Department of Biology that launched in 2019 The department has four graduate degrees: • M.S.
Rocco has known that he was interested in software engineering since his early teens, and even considered a coding bootcamp program instead of getting a university degree.
In spring 2016, soon after Zheng arrived to lead the department, there were 220 students enrolled — 175 undergraduates and 45 graduate students.
In the most recently available data, based on the First Destination survey of recent graduates, “97 percent of our undergraduates have a job within six months of graduation — basically full employment — and I believe that is the highest rate at UAB,” Zheng said.
A gift from alumnus David Brasfield , founder of NXTsoft, and his wife, Phyllis, has created the Phyllis and David Brasfield Endowed Faculty Scholarship in Computer Science.
“Perhaps the main reason I am drawn to teaching is the opportunity it offers to immerse yourself in a subject and to understand it deeply,” Johnstone said.
“That is one of the unique things computer science offers — with a lot of four-year degrees, you don’t necessarily have any guarantees that you will be able to support yourself; but computer science is lucrative,” Wilson said.
program was designed to allow students to combine a broad-based liberal arts education with a strong foundation in computer science, so that they become so-called T-shaped professionals.
Rocco chose to minor in mathematics, both “because it is incredibly interesting by itself but also because it supplements computer science very well,” he said.
One of the ways Rocco spent his time while at UAB was as part of the university’s Student Accelerator program, where he received funding and support to launch his own web development company.
After finishing her master’s degree at UAB, she took a research position at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and now has a Department of Energy Computer Science Graduate Fellowship to help fund her doctoral studies.