<p>Hi there,</p>
<p>Do the students at SMU have personal relationships with the Professors? Particularly Computer Science, how are the professors and do they make an effort to really help students throughout their college life? Do they professor know their students by their name? What is the environment like in an upper level CS class?</p>
<p>Any current students wanna message me so I can ask them some questions?!?!</p>
<p>Thanks!</p>
<p>I am currently a sophomore (about to be junior) Computer Science major at SMU. This university’s computer science department is arguably the epitome of personal student-professor relationships. I haven’t had a single CS class where the teacher didn’t at least know my face and name, and most of the time, they get to know way more than just my name. One CS professor that you will definitely get to know on a personal level very well is Professor Fontenot. He mainly teaches Data Structures and First Year Design, and he is also the adviser for CS majors. He also is the faculty-in-residence for the engineering floor/dorm, Cockerell-McIntosh (and unfortunately, the engineering floor is disappearing next year, but next year, Fontenot will be the faculty-in-residence in one of the new residential commons, Loyd). I could write a book about all the things that Fontenot does with his students, but just to name a few: he bakes cookies and brings them to the engineering floor, he brings engineering students to fun places (whirlyball, Perot Museum, etc), every Sunday he takes students to breakfast at a different place each week, and he frequently comes to the engineering floor to socialize with students. And these are just the things he does out of the classroom; in the classroom, he’s a phenomenal professor, so good that huge numbers of CS majors at SMU are getting top-level internships at companies like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, etc as a result of Fontenot’s and others’ teachings. Fontenot is probably the best that you will get in terms of personal relationships with professors, but I can assure you that almost every other CS professor (even in the upper level CS classes) will also get you know you personally in some way as well. The CS classes are all really small, like 20-30 people max.</p>
<p>I’ll send you a message as well, in case you want more information or have questions!</p>
<p>That is amazing news! Glad to hear Fontenot is so amazing but that implies his classes are probably very hard. Either way, I am ready to take on his challenge. Are you apart of any CS organizations, ACM, frats, etc. </p>
<p>Haha yes, his classes are some of the most difficult in the university, the data structures class is sort of the weed out class for computer science, and it is the gateway to all the upper level CS classes. But they are very, very rewarding.</p>
<p>I’m a part of ACM and SWE (society of women engineers). Very few CS majors here will join a frat or sorority, since it’s almost impossible to manage that with all your CS work. However, there are a few “frats” that are exceptions; there’s Theta Tau which is the co-ed engineering fraternity, and I know quite a few people in that. There’s also quite a few engineers/CS in BYX.</p>
<p>By the way, may I ask if you are an incoming student, or are you a prospective student for the next year?</p>
<p>Incoming Student, I hope to get involved in a few student organizations. When taking data structures, how many other CS classes do you think I can take without it being impossible to achieve good grades?</p>
<p>There aren’t a whole lot of CS classes that you can take concurrently with data structures since data structures is the prerequisite for almost all of them. I only took one other CS class along with data structures and that was Assembly, since that was like the only other one I could take. Data structures is a lot of work, though, so if you do find more CS classes that you can take along with data structures, I wouldn’t do more than 2 others along with it or you might never sleep. And as you probably guessed, it’s super important to pass data structures to be able to move on to upper level CS classes. The failure rate in that class is pretty high, something like a fourth of the students (just based on observation) don’t pass. But as long as you work hard, it’s definitely not impossible to get an A in that class and also your other classes.</p>