Course Information

Welcome! We are so excited to have every one of you in the Allen School community!

Key Links

• Discussion Board

• Seating Chart

• Meeting materials has all the materials we have available to share

• The course Canvas site is where we have participation recorded

• Syllabus and Course Policies

Learning Objectives

Everything we do in our seminar toward one of these goals, which we have developed based on our experience and passion helping students thrive in the Allen School and the entire field of computing.  These are in no particular order.

1. Academic Success: Improve academic skills and adapt study habits, academic integrity, and broader academic engagement to college and the Allen School.

2. Career Preparation: Broaden knowledge of career paths for Allen School students and develop skills and resources toward pursuing them.

3. Personal Growth and Well-Being: Identify key self-care needs related to mental health, confidence, time management, communication, and happiness in college.

4. Inclusive Behavior and Responsibility: Learn best practices for working in diverse and inclusive teams as well as how technological innovation can be a tool for or against existing biases and marginalization.

5. Community Building: Feel socially connected to other Allen School students and an empowered member of the broader Allen School community.

6. Extracurricular Opportunities: Identify co-curricular and extracurricular activities of interest to complement academic pursuits.

7. Impact: Learn some of the many, even surprising, ways that computing, including research in the Allen School, can positively impact humans and society while being mindful that technology can also have negative impact. 

8. Knowledge Building: Learn some of the jargon and pragmatics of “life in computer science and engineering” that can seem obscure or off-putting to newcomers.

Meetings

We meet on Mondays 3:30-4:50PM in Kane 120.  We will have jam-packed agendas with several activities each day, so please arrive in time to be seated and ready to go.

Staff and contact information

• To reach the entire staff, please create a private thread on the course discussion board.  This is the preferred way to reach the course staff so that any of us can respond to your question and the rest of us can see the response.  If you do need to reach out to just the instructor, feel free to email him.

• Instructor: Dan Grossman, djg@cs.washington.edu, he/him, office hours by appointment

• Anonymous feedback to the instructor

• Allen School Community Feedback page

Head TAs: Johnny Lee, Siham Mohamed
Each student is in a "group" with two of these wonderful TAs:

• Group 1 / ☕ : Adam Benazouz and Vicky Huang

• Group 2 / 🍩 : Irene Lau and Trisha Bhatawdekar

• Group 3 / 😀 : Ahana Roy and Nathan Li

• Group 4 / 👓 : Alan Ly and Anika Arugunta

• Group 5 / 💜 : Ali Jaffery and Gianna Carlson

• Group 6 / 💡 : Anas Slassi and Ava Nunes

• Group 7 / 🔒 : Angela Wu and Praveer Jain

• Group 8 / 🍄 : Ankit Gowda and Emma Lee

• Group 9 / 🐧 : Chetan Sidhu and Esther Kim

• Group 10 / 🍕 : Jonathan Trinh and Thomas Chen

• Group 11 / ⚽ : Lakshmi Osorio and Nitya Somini Addanki 

• Group 12 / ⭐ : Ronny Erlich and Srimedha Thummala

• Group 13 / ⌚ : Akshita Amarnath and Scott Dang

Acknowledgments

This seminar is a real team effort, especially with substantial contributions from the spectacular Allen School Undergraduate Student Services Team.  It builds on the experience from prior years, including the amazing work of TAs from prior offerings.  It fundamentally relies on a wide range of presenters and activity-leaders.