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For the past month, the Hillsdale College Math Department has posted an open position for a Computer Science professor in hopes of restoring the Computer Science minor.
From the late ‘80s until 2015, one of the math professors, Ryan Zeller, offered a plethora of classes that would satisfy the minor. After his retirement in ’15, the department decided not to replace the program immediately.
“After about five years several departments began to want to go in the direction of Computer Science,” Chairman and Professor of Mathematics Thomas Treloar said.
Several departments have compiled a tentative course list for the minor which would begin with an introduction to programming course and an object-oriented programming course. From there, the new computer science professor would decide what other courses to offer. As of recent years, the student interest in a computer science minor has increased exponentially, according to Treloar.
“A few years ago an applied math club started that morphed into a mathematical programming club,” Treloar said, “There have been 20-25 people that would show up to regular meetings that wanted to learn programming; mostly focused on Python.”
The applied math club began unofficially about four years ago according to junior Nick West, applied math club vice president.
“Our former professor Dr. Panaggio met with a few students to discuss math modeling techniques,” West said. “As interest grew, so did the number of people attending, and so we applied for official club status last year.”
The club transformed its focus from math modeling to basic programming, as there were no other official groups on campus dedicated to computer science. West said club meetings consist of programming tutorials or discussing specific problem-solving techniques.
While Hillsdale hasn’t offered a computer science minor for quite some time, Hillsdale offered other programming-oriented classes in the recent past.
Assistant Professor of Physics Timothy Dolch has taught Computational Physics two times in recent years.
“This course uses the Python programming language to construct simulations of orbital dynamics,” Dolch said. “Some students took this course in order to learn Python, if taking Introduction to Python from the Mathematics and Computer Science Department didn’t work for their schedules.”
Similarly, the math department has started to offer courses in data analytics and statistics. According to Treloar, more students have shown a demonstrated interest in courses like these.
“Everytime we offer a class in that direction of computer science, we have a lot of students interested in taking it,” he said.
