Syllabus

Note: Alumni visits are not completely scheduled. But don’t worry, they will be soon.

Overview

Welcome to the Fall 2021 session of Grinnell College’s CSC 281, a course entitled Thinking Beyond Grinnell—Learning from CS Alumni. In this course, we will meet (mostly virtually) with alumni who have careers related to computer science. They will talk about their life and career paths, provide advice for students on things to learn and things to do , and answer questions.

The focus of the class is the visits by alumni. While in some years some of these visits will involve alumni coming directly to campus, this year, almost all of our visits will be online via Webex or Teams.

The Web site for the course is http://www.cs.grinnell.edu/~rebelsky/Courses/CSC281/2021Fa/ You find find some interesting things on the course web, and I’d encourage you to look there.

Some Basics

Instructor

Samuel A. Rebelsky. rebelsky@grinnell.edu. Cell 641-990-2947. Office hours TBD.

Meets

Tu 2:00-3:50 p.m. CDT

Grading

This course is offered for one credit and is graded as S/D/F. All students who take the course are expected to do the following. Since Grinnell expects that each one-credit course require 45 hours of work, I have annotated each expectation with the approximate time it will take.

• attend all the class meetings and participate in discussion (26 hours);
• facilitiate (or co-facilitate) one or two days of virtual alumni visits (2–4 hours);
• do a one-hour informational interview with at least one alum (not necessarily one of our visitors) (2 hours, including prep and response);
• write a short reflective piece on each alumni visit (14 hours); and
• write a short reflective piece at the end of the semester (1 hour).

Accommodations

My goal is to help you learn as much as possible in this course; please let me know what I can do meet your learning needs. If you have a disability that requires accommodations, please contact Disability Services. Disability Resources will work with you to determine your needs, and will provide you with paperwork outlining the accommodations you require. Please give me this paperwork at least a week before the course activity for which you need accommodations. If this timeline is not feasible for any reason, please contact me as soon as possible and we will work together to find a solution.

You can find additional information on my approaches to accommodations in an appendix to this syllabus.

Religious observance policy

Grinnell College acknowledges and embraces the religious diversity of its faculty, students and staff. Faculty and students share responsibility to support members of our community who observe religious holidays. Students will provide faculty members with reasonable notice of the dates of religious holidays on which they will be absent, and this notice would be expected to occur no later than the third week of the term. Faculty members will make reasonable efforts to accommodate students who need to be absent from examinations or class due to religious observance. Students are responsible for completing any part of the course work, including examinations, they have missed due to religious observance, and faculty members are responsible for giving them the opportunity to do so. (Approved by the Faculty, September 21, 2009)

Textbooks / references

There are no textbooks for this class. If alumni request you to do readings, I will distribute them to you.

Attendance

Attendance is required.

Participation

You will rarely have an opportunity to participate in communal question-and-answer sessions with alumni or other CS professionals. Experience suggests that our alums are fairly open in their responses, willing to share the bad as well as the good. As a member of this class, you should participate actively in the Q&A sessions, formulating and asking questions and responding to questions when asked.

Note that “asking questions” is an important skill for you to develop. Listening carefully to someone and synthesizing a question based on what they said helps you form connections.

Academic honesty

As students, you are members of the academic community. Both the College and I expect the highest standards of academic honesty, as explained in the Grinnell College Student Handbook.

You are permitted to discuss any and all assignments with your colleagues.

Class structure

A typical class session will consist of the following.

• Any introductory remarks from Professor Rebelsky.
• An introduction to the first speaker provided by one of the students.
• An approximately thirty-minute talk on some topic by the speaker.
• A fifteen-minute “life story” by the speaker.
• Questions and answers.
  • From the students to the speakers.
  • From the speakers to the students.

As noted earlier, for this structure to be successful, students must be actively engaged in the class. In particular, they must be active in developing thoughtful questions for the speakers and in responding to questions from the speakers.

Facilitating alumni visits

The students in this course are responsible for hosting and facilitating the visits of the alumni. (Practice with organizing visits is one of the learning goals of the course.) At the start of the semester, students will sign up in groups to facilitate alumni visits.

As the facilitator for a visit, you are expected to work with the alumnus or alumna on the following in advance of the visit.

• Help them understand the structure of the class.
• Identify any resources they would like students to read or explore before their talk.
• Write or obtain a short biographical sketch.
• Write or obtain a short abstract for the talk that can be distributed before the meeting.
• Make sure that they are comfortable with the technology. You can also involve Professor Rebelsky in this activity.

Your work also continues into the class session. During the class session you facilitate, you should do the following:

• Introduce the alumna or alumnus.
• Facilitate discussion.
• Be ready to ask a wide variety of questions.