Our department has never lacked for applicants of excellent quality. However, we regularly lose highly qualified applicants to schools that are of comparable or marginally better quality. In an effort to increase the number of these top applicants that come here, the department will organize a day for showcasing the research activities in the department. All admitted applicants will be invited, and the department will offer to reimburse part of their travel expenses, say up to $600. This will take place on a weekend day sometime in March, after our admission offers have been made. Because the Washington area with its social and cultural activities is one of our strengths, we will also provide some of our graduate students to serve as guides for visiting applicants that wish to visit the area for a second day. The showcase day will be a major event, involving many of the faculty, staff, and current graduate students.

Faculty commitment to this includes giving presentations, lab visits, and demos, meeting the visiting applicants. Current graduate students will help in hosting.

We will still need to host students individually or in small groups, because not all applicants will be able to attend the showcase day. We anticipate a total of around 60 visiting applicants (for both the showcase day and individual visits), for a total cost of $36,000. The department will supply $18,000 of its own funds to this effort.

An important part of recruitment is one-on-one contact. Each faculty member will be assigned a small number of admitted applicants in their general area of interest. He or she will be responsible for contacting the applicant by phone or email to encourage them to come here, to answer questions about the department, and to generally provide a personal touch that may be important in an applicant’s final decision.

We are committed to getting our students involved in research at an early stage in their graduate education. One impediment to this is the cost of attending research conferences. To remedy this all accepting applicants will be allocated some amount of money, say $500, that can be used for attending conferences during their first two years. (The department already provides some funding for more advanced students to attend conferences.) This will send a strong signal that we want students to start on their research early and that we are committed to their intellectual development and future success. We anticipate an annual cost of $30,000 for this, of which the department will provide $15,000.

In spite of our department’s high ranking, we still find that many undergraduates at other institutions are not aware of our department and its many strengths. One way of publicizing our department is for our faculty to visit other institutions to showcase our graduate program, talk to their undergraduates, establish ties to their faculty to help identify promising students, distribute advertising materials, etc. Although our faculty members regularly visit top-20 universities, many of our best students come from small liberal-arts colleges, which do not have large budgets for supporting visiting speakers. We will provide funds to support selected faculty to visit some of these schools each year in order to establish these important contacts. We are budgeting $10,000 for this program, of which $5,000 will be paid through department funds.

African Americans, Hispanics and women are under-represented in the field of computer science and our department is committed to improving its diversity. One of the ways that we can achieve this is by identifying the best minority undergraduates in computer science and recruiting them aggressively. We propose to target historically black institutions in our faculty visits (mentioned above) to help identify their best students, and convince them to apply to our department.

An important part of the graduate experience is having state-of-the-art computer facilities and a comfortable place to work. The quality of the computational facilities is particularly important in computer science. In contrast with peer institutions, much of our equipment is older and slower. We propose to improve the quantity and quality of computational facilities that are available to graduate students. We will also provide new and better office furniture and better space, so that graduate students have a better environment for working, eating, relaxing, stretching out, crashing, etc. We feel that $40,000 will be needed for this of which the department will supply half.

We will introduce research assistantships funded by the department, intended for students to work in areas where there are faculty but no grant funding. This would be restricted to Ph.D. students, e.g., students who have completed qualifying coursework or advanced to candidacy. This will be covered entirely by departmental funds and other sources.

It is important for graduate students to start thinking about research as soon as they enter the program. For the first month or two of the Fall semester, we will schedule weekly colloquia in which faculty members will present their research in half-hour talks (two faculty per colloquium). Attendance for incoming graduate students will be required. This would serve as a proper conclusion to the more intense orientation process that the new students go through in the week preceding the start of classes. It will also give our students an opportunity to learn more about the research projects going on in our large faculty.

Our graduate students regularly request more frequent contact with faculty outside of the classroom. We will have regularly scheduled lunches involving small groups of faculty and students, especially first year graduate students. This will provide a more informal opportunity for graduate students and faculty to interact, discuss ongoing and future research plans, and to engender a greater sense of community.