The CS Way: Making Elective Choices Easier

Due to the intense structure of engineering programs at Waterloo, students are presented with a limited number of elective choices throughout their five years at the school. This presents students with stressful and sometimes confusing decisions when it comes to choosing their upper year technical electives. Moreover, these electives are often scheduled to conflict with one another and many students are pigeonholed into taking courses that they do not want to take, wasting the student’s time and credits, and potentially affecting their GPA.
To find a potential solution to this problem, we can look outside of Engineering and towards Computer Science (CS). CS currently hosts a website that contains a list of all the courses offered by the school with links to course websites, descriptions, and calendar entries. In addition to this, most of the upper year electives courses offered by Computer Science feature a Youtube video of the professor who either authored or taught the course discussing the course in extensive detail.
The website concept solves many of the problems that face engineers. First, it centralizes all the information regarding specific courses in a readable and easily navigable format. Second, all information for the course is on the website including syllabuses, when the course is offered, and the textbook for the course. Third, having a professor schedule a short amount of time to present and record a lecture lets students see that professor’s lecture style, have course selection reference for the future, and find out what is actually taught in a course. Lastly, having a thorough online resource is an invaluable asset for engineers due to their, at times, ridiculous schedules. Attending an info-session for a course or scheduling a meeting with a professor can be challenging if not impossible. Offering the possibility for a student to retrieve information for a course at ease removes this problem and can reduce the amount of stress on a student.
As an example, let’s examine the CS course CS360, Introduction to the Theory of Computing. From the name alone, it is fairly difficult to figure out what exactly the course teaches or whom it is directed at. Looking at the calendar, the course is described as teaching “Models of computers including finite automata and Turing machines… Unsolvable problems and their relevance to the semantics of programming.” This really doesn’t help this process either, because the description provides no information about the difficulty, workload, scheduling, or who would enjoy the course. However, when someone goes to the course description page and watches the video, he or she can find out that the target audience for the course is “Some exposure to the theoretical foundations of Computer Science is considered useful for all CS graduates, especially for anyone intending to continue studies at the graduate level,” and that the course is three lecture hours a week and is offered in all terms. Furthermore, the page has specific information on how each topic in the course is explored, with specific examples from the lecture material.
If Engineering provided more resources for choosing electives in the way that Computer Science does, many students would find course selection less stressful, avoid wasting credits, and be better prepared when they begin their courses each term. The time and effort required to implement this would be minor for all parties involved and could even open up some co-op opportunities for students to organize and develop the website. Furthermore, once a framework is in place for an entire faculty it is more likely that the rest of the university will follow suit, further simplifying the enrolment process.