Graduate Orientation and Computer & Computational Sciences Research Day 2022

On Wednesday, August 24, the department hosted its annual Orientation Day to welcome its Fall 2022 cohort of graduate students. 

The event was attended by more than 60 incoming PhD students and 20 new Master of Science students. Professor Matthias Zwicker, the Department Chair, welcomed the new students to UMD, and Professor Ramani Duraiswami, the Associate Chair for Graduate Education, provided the students with an overview of the graduate education program. Staff from the department and UMIACS introduced the incoming students to the logistics of using IT facilities, payroll, and other administrative offices. The department’s graduate student organization (GradCo) organized panels of current graduate students and faculty to provide more insight to the incoming new students. Students also got their headshots taken by a professional photographer, for use in their university webpages and professional social media profiles.

Students also attended sessions on Teaching Assistant training, resources provided by the UMD Teaching & Learning Transformation Center (TLTC), and best practices on adapting to graduate student life.

“While in the past we had relied on students learning many of these things by osmosis, having a structured orientation program was very useful, and feedback was uniformly positive,” said Professor Duraiswami.

On the following day, the department celebrated the 2022 Computer & Computational Sciences Research Day. Co-hosted with UMIACS, the event featured more than 35 faculty talks and was attended by more than 110 students, faculty, and guests. The presentations offered a unique opportunity both for new and existing students and faculty to discuss and understand the current research efforts and opportunities in the Department of Computer Science. 

“I think this was really excellent,” said incoming PhD student Hirad Yazdankhah. “It gave me a very good introduction to the professors and their areas of work that I could not really get from the other sources.” 

The topic areas presented at this event included Algorithms and Theory, Artificial Intelligence, Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, Computer Vision, Cybersecurity, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Network Systems, Programming Languages, Robotics, Virtual Reality and Visual Computing, and more.

“We are absolutely thrilled to welcome our new cohort of graduate students and to start working with them on exciting research projects ! I hope our events provided them with a warm welcome and the necessary information to hit the ground running and achieve their goals at UMD!”, said Department Chair Zwicker.

The events were organized by Assistant Director of Graduate Education Tom Hurst, and Professor Ramani Duraiswami.