Reviewers' Notebook: Expectations for Scholarship

From CSWiki

As the introduction to this section suggests, all Grinnell faculty are expected to have produced some peer-reviewed scholarly products before tenure. The Department of Computer Science certainly expects its faculty to be active scholars. However, we consider a broad range of scholarly activities appropriate for our faculty: Not just conference and journal papers, but also software and educational resources are appropriate scholarly activities. A few years ago, the joint Department of Mathematics and Computer Science prepared a memo on the scholarly expectations of that department. The individual departments have continued to support this document. It appears in Appendix G of the hardcopy document, and can also be found at http://www.cs.grinnell.edu/~walker/dept/scholarship-expectations.html.

Student-Faculty Research

Grinnell's Science Division has a long-standing tradition of involving students in faculty research projects. Most typically, this involvement includes a summer-long research project, similar to an NSF REU. Approximately 100 science students remain in Grinnell each summer to participate in summer research. Student-Faculty research is also conducted during the academic year, but time pressures are such that summer research is much more common.

In many science departments, it is expected that faculty will support summer research projects in most summers. The Department of Computer Science has chosen to let faculty decide what strategy is most appropriate for themselves and their research programs: While we encourage faculty to select research projects that can involve undergraduates and to supervise summer research students, we do not require faculty to take on summer students.

It is clear that full-time research or software development experiences are valuable to CS students. Certainly, such experiences add important experience to the student's resume. In addition, these experiences often improve the confidence of many of our mid-level students, who find that although they get B's (and sometimes C's) in classes, they are able to plan and conduct a serious project. Because of this value, we do our best to support summer experiences. In most recent summers, we have supported approximately ten students in summer experiences.

We also encourage students to look elsewhere for summer experiences: REUs, Internships, etc. This past summer, nine students did research at Grinnell, three students participated in the Google summer of code, three students participated in REUs, and three students (that we know of) participated in industry internships.