Hi, I'm Patrick McDaniel. I'm a professor of Computer Science in the College of
Engineering at Penn State University. Computer science focuses on the study of
computation including its principles and foundations, its efficient implementation
its analysis and practical use in a wide range of application areas. These areas
include electronic commerce, communication, entertainment, engineering,
healthcare, and the social, physical, and life sciences. Computer science students
complete coursework in systems programming, programming language
concepts, data structures and algorithms operating systems design, security
networking, and database systems. Computer science graduates are in high demand in
a wide variety of industries as software drives so much of the technology in the
world today. Computer science is designed and built
software ranging from small, standalone applications to components of large
complex systems. Penn State computer science majors typically start their
careers as software engineers, application developers, system
implementers, software project managers, cyber security analysts, or software
testers others go on to launch startups or explore research and some of the top
graduate programs in the world. The Penn State computer science curriculum
provides students with the skills needed to design development evaluate and
analyze software solutions to a wide spectrum of computational problems and
prepares them to be leaders in the rapidly changing field of computation
throughout their careers. It's easy for computer scientists to have impact on
the world in fact arguably computer science is really driving the
advancement of our society software allows us to explore new technologies
that were science fiction just a few short years ago everything from
autonomous vehicles that drive themselves to virtual worlds in which we
can exist in games and entertainment if you want to have an ability to affect
people on a global scale computer science is a great major for you if you
want to have an ability to create these artifacts that really affect people from
anywhere from the u.s. to say China you want an opportunity to affect structural
change maybe first a social injustice that you see in the world computer
science is a great major for you so there are a lot of options and a lot of
ways to really affect the world around I would say every other field revolves
around computer science everything every functioning unit in this world requires
some amount of hardware and software computer scientists really work on
making algorithms more efficient figuring out how you can do a specific
task and the most optimized way possible computer engineers will more take that
code and then apply it to the hardware so if you have something like an fpga
board that you need to program something onto the computer scientists may we're
focused on writing the code for that but then the computer engineers will figure
out how they can actually implement that on to one of those boards and figure out
how the hardware and the software interact the types of classes in our
major range everything from coding in machine code all the way up to high
levels things like artificial intelligence security mechanisms there
are plenty of research opportunities for undergrads in computer science and CCC
Department has all the all the facilities to provide you undergrad
research and they love taking undergrads in their lives how PSU is a 24-hour
hackathon event basically teams come from across the country we had over a
thousand students at our last event and they work on a programming project for
24 hours and then they get to show it to sponsors and they compete and win awards
which is really awesome and it's cool to get involved with that because you get
the event planning side of it but also there's technical side of it when I look
around the industry right now the thing that I think is most promising is what's
going on with quantum computing with the ability to have quantum computers set up
across distances across enterprises across various system boundaries for
very secure very protected computing as well as solving different kinds of
problems in different ways but I think one other big thing that's really
starting to come into the area and people are worried about when they
create these systems as ethics if you're really interested in the way that the
systems affect the world around you ethics and computer science is also a
big area which is coming into its own as we move forward even in my four years at
Penn State I'm just going to see so much change in the field and I know that in
my career there will always be something new to keep me entertained I will never
get bored in my job or be stuck or feel stagnant because that's just not how the
field works and I'm very passionate about being able
to spread computer science to other people and help them realize that they
can do it too and that they might love it because it is a field that's really
up-and-coming right now and especially as a woman I really want to help get
more people involved in the major so I just love the chance to both do that and
also to know that my work will always be really impactful to the world and
relevant to what's changing in our modern society
I think computer science is a great degree for students who really want to
innovate they want to have the ability to explore how to use technologies to
change every aspect of our lives from communication to education to healthcare
to science and how to use software and hardware to make us more effective at
all of these endeavors
you