CSE faculty and staff are committed to building an inclusive environment that encourages, supports, and celebrates the diverse voices of our students. This commitment is important as we educate new generations of scientists and engineers. Our graduates will become members of a diverse workforce that reflects the communities they serve.
To enrich the student educational experience facilitated by a diverse student body, we have embraced an accelerated approach to diversity and inclusion with exceptional support and activities that are designed to recruit and assist the personal development, academic achievement, and graduation of underrepresented groups in the computing field.
Our Broadening Participation in Computing (BPC) mission statement is:
A computing workforce from many backgrounds, cultures, and identities ensures that future computing products and services will reflect the needs and concerns of all members of our society. Fostering an inclusive climate to enable all students to be able to successfully earn a degree and enter the workforce is important to us. It is who we are. A major goal and focus of CSE is to increase the percentage of degrees awarded to women and underrepresented populations in computing, as articulated in our mission statement. We call this focus, following national guidelines, Broadening Participation in Computing (BPC).
To achieve our goal, we have undertaken a number of initiatives. These initiatives are described here in our BPC website.
Read more here
The CSE Computing Partner Program (CPP) members actively support BPC activities with their generous monetary donations and time. CPP members engage closely with all of our students. CPP member logos are listed below.
For more information on joining the CPP, see the industry page
Student organizations are the fabric of student life in CSE and in the College. All CSE student
organizations are listed here
Several student organizations are specifically focused on women and URMs. These organizations are listed.
USF CSE remains committed to hiring top-quality faculty that better reflects the increasing diversity of our student body.
Our recent hires include:
The CSE department is committed to creating pathways into computing for undergraduate students in other majors.
This includes updating admission criteria, and increasing enrollment in our non-major computing course (CGS 2060). We will also work to draw students from underrepresented groups from non-computing disciplines to our Masters in CS program.
CSE faculty members are currently executing $9.6 million in active external research grants, each spanning 3 to 5 years, of which $5.6 million are from NSF, $2.3 million are from the Department of Defense, and the rest from NIH, NIST, industry, and state sources.
In 2020, the Department of Computer Science and Engineering received a three-year, $579,737 grant from the Center for Inclusive Computing at Northeastern University for funding evidence-based approaches to attract and retain more women computer science students.