<p>I am a member of SCS 2011. Could anyone tell me what kind of CS-related activities and work opportunities are available on campus?</p>
<p>You'll probably get enough CS-ness from your classes, but if it's not enough for you...</p>
<p>Activities: Game Creation Society, Computer Club, Student Technology Outreach, Women@SCS, Research</p>
<p>Jobs: Research Programmer/Assistant, Course Assistant, Teaching Assistant, Lab Assistant, Cluster Consultant</p>
<p>These lists are not all-inclusive; just what I came up with off the top of my head.</p>
<p>Do you have a sci-fi club? (Movies and/or books)?</p>
<p>what of research? do lower classmen have the opportunity to "participate" in research?</p>
<p>mathmom- I don't know if there is a sci-fi club (just because I don't know about it doesn't mean it doesn't exist), but there is an anime club and a board games club (I know you mentioned your son playing a bunch of board games when he visited another school). Also, there's a store a block from campus that sells eclectic board games, Dungeons and Dragons stuff, trading cards, and Warhammer figurines, if that's something he's interested in.</p>
<p>Spartan- Pretty much any research related to CS that you'd want. Just go to the CS department's website, and read the bios of some professors or something. Depending on your background, it may or may not be possible for you to get involved first semester, but surely by sophomore year you would be able to do some research.</p>
<p>To add to the list of activities posted by KrazyKow, Greek life is great at CMU. You'll find that it is far from the stereotypical fraternity life depicted by the media over the yeras, and will lead you to the much needed balance in your CMU career.</p>
<p>I think he's grown out of D&D and younger brother was the Warhammer guy. (Mostly he loved making boards!) Board playing club sounds good. He hates anime. I'm actually pretty sure he'll find his crowd. Just being at SCS is going to be quite a change for him.</p>
<p>Abstraction is right; Greek life at CMU is a bit different than at many schools. One frat is filled with CS majors and engineers who are social but very serious about their studies; it is dry and they actually keep it that way (including parties). It's still not the right choice for everyone, but it might be the right choice for some people you wouldn't necessarily think of as frat boys (fraternity men?).</p>
<p>What about the class sizes at CMU? Is there a close interaction with faculty?</p>
<p>Class sizes vary quite a bit. One of the big advantages of the relatively large number of computer science majors (approximately 140/year) is that there are a bunch of specialized classes that you might not find at another school; one of the downsides is that some of the core classes are large (by small private school standards). 15-100 typically runs with a cap of 30, 15-111 around 65, but 15-211/212/213 can fall anywhere between 100 and 160, I'd say. All of these large, core courses also have recitations that meet at least once a week and have at most 30 students and are taught by a TA that is either an undergraduate who has taken the course and done well or a graduate student. You'll find that upper division classes have much smaller enrollments; for instance, the maximum class size of one AI course is 10, I think.</p>
<p>That said, if you want to get to know your professors, just stop by when they have office hours. Most professors are happy to meet with students for whatever reason. If you sit in the front and chat with the professor before or after class, you can get to know him (or her, but there's approximately 1 female that teaches 100 and 200 level courses).</p>
<p>Spartan-117: My son and I visited this past April and spent 3 hours talking with a friend of mine who is a research professor at CMU. He said that 70% of the student body in CS is doing research. It's easy to do research even freshman year if you express interest in a particular project and get to know the professor. Also, Microsoft, Intel and Google have offices in a building right next to the CS building so internships simply require a phone call from a professor.</p>