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Purdue’s Revamp Blog

Purdue has recently attained a new president of the university as well as a new president of the computer science department. Both new presidents have made a very clear show of intent to revamp a lot of cruft around the university. The computer science department has recently released a new curriculum which removes a lot of the weird (human) language requirements in favor of study abroad and things of this sort. They’ve also set up a plan to integrate concurrency programming and science into the entire curriculum from start to finish. This means first year, first semester computer science students will be learning concurrency along with print statements. I think this is a great idea because really, if we weren’t raised with the paradigm that concurrency is hard, would anyone really think anything of it? I remember thinking, when I first started in CS, that it was weird that most programs only had one thread of execution. Along with the new computer science building, I think these changes could really boost Purdue’s rankings.

Purdue President: Dr. Córdova

The new university president has a very impressive resume and has held positions like “Head of Research at NASA.” I’ve had the pleasure of hearing her speak on university reform as well as reading a lot of her words in the school news paper. Definitely a smart, smart person. I have yet to disagree with even one of her many reform issues. Today, all Purdue related people received an email about a new (WordPress!) blog dedicated to the president’s new “Strategic Plan,” asking for comments and feedback! This is a huge undertaking for a university of this size and definitely the way to go. I gladly made a few comments about website unification and campus design. Many other students have already posted some great ideas as well. Bravo to president Córdova.

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  • http://philharnish.tumblr.com Phil Harnish

    I agree that our website needs serious work. I was asked to make suggestions for improving pages in the College of Science. That turned out to be a monumental undertaking and I doubt I came up with anything helpful.

    I think they really need more people working on this than they already do. People with the explicit job of maintaining brand. Right now all of the IT guys are constantly occupied with adding or modifying content. It’s a negative spiral that’s only going to get worse the more pages are added.

    That said, if anyone has any “low hanging fruit” which could improve the situation hit up Laurie Swift (contact information). She has a dozen students from the College of Science to work on things like this.

  • http://humani.st Luke Hoersten

    I really feel like the problem is university wide, not just in the College of Science. They need a blanket solution almost like a wiki or something where departments etc, can add content without being expected to make a design. I feel, like you said, that it’s mainly office workers and IT people making these websites and it really needs to be split. They need a few university designers as full time employees that just work on the website. Then each College needs people to delegate content generation. This fully decentralized model Purdue uses right now is ridiculous.

  • http://feroze.org Feroze Shahpurwala

    wut up luke! Nice site man, i like the articles, ill visit often.

  • http://humani.st Luke Hoersten

    Hey thanks a lot.

  • http://feroze.org Feroze Shahpurwala

    wut up luke! Nice site man, i like the articles, ill visit often.

  • http://humani.st Luke Hoersten

    Hey thanks a lot.