Computer departments merge

by Becky Boushley
BOU02002@BYUI.EDU
Scroll Staff

The new Computer Science and Engineering Department is not one of the changes that has come about because of the new BYU-Idaho name, but is a change that university officials have contemplated for about eight years, Max Checketts, academic vice president, said.

“Last year we changed from divisions to colleges, but at that time this merger did not seem right,” Checketts said. “We have been contemplating how to group the resources and the students just right.”

The process to the new department was a simple one because the two departments compliment each other so well, Greg Cameron, the new Computer Science and Engineering Department chair, said. Computer science is the building of software, and computer engineering is the building of hardware.

“The hardware is the tangible part of the computer, and the software is what you can’t see that makes the computer work: the programs. A good way to explain it is our body is the hardware, and our spirit is the software,” Cameron said.

The two departments also share a common area on campus. They were both co-located and cross-taught, so it was not a hard transition to move into the same rooms and share the teaching loads.

“Having a larger department makes it easier for us to serve each other and work together. It makes it so convenient now to be working in the same department, under one chair, instead of working between departments,” Cameron said.

For those students who were already enrolled in either of these specialized degrees, none of the requirements have changed. All those students who major in one of these fields begin in the same core classes, and then start taking more specialized courses.

Being able to teach those core classes together instead of having to require students to take classes in the other field has actually made requirements much clearer, and it has allowed communication between students and teachers to be much easier.

“One of the critical issues was trying to see if faculty could have their critical developing time,” Checketts said. “I interviewed all of the faculty and counseled with other administrators before making this final decision to bring them together.”

When one professor takes time to develop his or her curriculum in a small department, it puts a huge strain on all of the other teachers to cover class time.

The same concept is felt when any teacher from that department takes a sabbatical, but when a larger department faces those situations there are enough open hours between them that it is not a time problem.

“When there is that little bit of overlap, it is more efficient to have one head. This university is ready for that, and they can handle the multiple prefixes for classes,” Checketts said. “The brethren have asked us to be very careful about not duplicating resources because it wastes tithing money, and so this merger needed to happen.”