Computer Science | Grinnell College

These are some of the questions we've received about the position, along with our answers. We have posted them with the expectation that they will also be useful to others. Feel free to send additional questions to CSSearch@grinnell.edu.

Is this a new position or a replacement position?

This is a new position, intended primarily to support growth in the major and permit additional breadth of offerings.

Will you consider candidates who do not have a Ph.D.?

We will certainly consider candidates who are on track to the Ph.D., but have not yet completed their dissertation. College policy requires that tenure-track faculty have completed their Ph.D. (or other terminal degree) by the time of their third-year review.

What courses will the new hire teach?

Grinnell's normal teaching load is five courses (or equivalent) over two semesters. We try to make sure that faculty in their first year teach two sections of either CSC 151, Functional Problem Solving, the first course in our introductory sequence, or CSC 161, Imperative Problem Solving, the second course in our introductory sequence. In each semester, we'll pair you with an experienced faculty member who will be teaching another section of that course. Other than that, we will do our best to allow you to teach the courses in our curriculum that you would prefer to teach. As time goes on, we will encourage you to expand into other courses; we're a collegial department and try to work out schedules that balance interests and workload each year. It looks like we'll have room in our schedule for a new course in year two, and the new hire will have the opportunity to design that course to meet their scholarly interests. Finally, as the advertisement notes, every few years each faculty member teaches tutorial, a seminar-style class for first-year students.

How many students are there in CS courses?

We cap our introductory courses at 28, our mid-level courses at 24, and our upper-level courses at 20. Current demand means that most courses enroll to capacity. We currently graduate about 60 CS majors each year.

What are Grinnell College students like?

Hmmm ... that's an interesting question. By and large, we find Grinnell students a joy to teach. Most of them are taking classes because they want to learn, not because they have to or because they need to check off a box in order to graduate. Almost all of them have multiple interests. We see CS majors doing improv, playing in ensembles and bands, competing on the athletic fields, and more.

Is there financial support for faculty scholarship?

Each faculty member gets a base annual budget of $3,000 to cover supplies, travel, and assistants. An additional $5,000 is available through a competitive process. Summer research students are covered out of a separate budget, as are supplies for those students. New faculty get reasonably generous startup packages. In computer science, each faculty member has their own research lab. Other resources are also available on a case-by-case basis.

Is there interdisciplinary work at Grinnell that could involve computer science?

In general, yes. Faculty in many disciplines use computing as part of their work. Some likely collaborations would like be with our biology faculty who are interested in bioinformatics, our computational chemists, faculty working on the cross-disciplinary data science program, and some of our arts, music, or theater faculty. But others are certainly possible. In the end, it depends on two faculty finding common interests.

What do Grinnell students do after graduation?

The College helps us track graduate outcomes of our majors (many also like to keep in touch with the faculty). Our computer science majors generally go on to do the typical variety of things that CS majors do. Some end up at the "big three" (Google, Microsoft, Amazon). Some end up at startups. A few go on to graduate school immediately after college. Some end up in the financial industry. Some head off to volunteer opportunities at Teach for America or Lutheran Volunteer Corps. Over the longer term, some bring their general thinking skills to other areas. We count physicians, professional comedians, fundraisers, and helicopter pilots among our CS alumni.

Will you consider candidates in (fill in the discipline)?

If that discipline is reasonably considered with the scope of computer science (and yes, as our ad suggests, we consider a variety of areas within the scope of computer science) and the candidate is qualified to teach a variety of courses in the undergraduate computer science curriculum, then yes, we would consider that candidate.

What is it like living in Grinnell, Iowa?

Grinnell is a small town, with about 8500 residents (plus about 1600 Grinnell College students). It's affordable. Many faculty live within walking distance of the College. Some faculty choose to live in Iowa City or Des Moines, each of which is about an hour away. Our schools are decent, and the community provides a lot of interesting extracurricular activities. The older faculty in the department all note that we found this a great place to raise our children.

The Grinnell Office of Communications and the Office of Community Enhancement and Engagement created a series of videos to help visitors understand what it's like living and working in Grinnell.

At noon on Friday, October 9, Dr. Harold Trease of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory will speak on Video analytics for indexing, summarization and searching streaming video and video archives:

Given streaming video or video archives, how does one effectively summarize, classify, and search the information contained within such a large amount of image data? In this presentation, we address these issues by describing a process for the automated generation of a table of contents and of keyword, topic-based index tables that can be used to catalogue, summarize, and search large amounts of video data. Having the ability to index and search the information contained within the videos, beyond just metadata tags, provides a mechanism to extract and identify useful content. During this presentation, we describe some of the mathematics, computer science and engineering, and applications of being able to use image and video keywords as the primary search criteria, much as Web browsers (such as Google) allow us to search text today.

Dr. Trease is a graduate of the University of Nebraska at Kearney and received his doctorate from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in nuclear engineering. He has more than thirty years of research experience in the design, implementation, and application of high-throughput, high-performance computer software. He currently leads the P3D Code Development Project. P3D is a large-scale framework for modeling, simulation, and prediction in computational physics.

Pizza and soda will be served before the talk. Everyone is welcome to attend!

This lecture serves as this week's CS Table.

On Thursday, October 8, Alex Exarhos 2010 will present the results of his summer research on analyzing videos:

I worked with a set of video indexing and searching algorithms through a Department of Homeland Security internship. These algorithms are capable of quickly providing a summary of a video by breaking it up into sections based on the content, and this method of indexing makes it possible to instantly locate other images, frames, or video segments within the indexed library. I will also talk about the web services I created for these algorithms, and the work I did implementing a mobile interface for a Google Android phone.

Refreshments will be served at 4:15 p.m. in the Computer Science Commons (Noyce 3817). The talk, Interfaces for video analytics, will follow at 4:30 p.m. in Noyce 3821.