Unique Approach to Graduate Education Yields Great Growth in Computer Science Program

As you may know, we’ve recently expanded our Seattle Graduate campus, to an additional 10,000 square feet of classrooms and collaboration space just a block away from our 401 Terry Ave N. campus.

In the coming weeks we will be inviting friends and the community to join us, check out the space, and celebrate the added capacity for education in our community.

We are also adding approximately 5,000 square feet in office and meeting space at the south end of our 401 Terry Ave N. campus. Together, these two new spaces will allow us to accommodate the recent growth in our enrollment and the growth we anticipate in the future, all while positioned in the heart of South Lake Union.  As our Seattle-based faculty grows, we now have office space to meet their needs and allow student-faculty meetings.

To expand on the data, we started the Seattle campus in 2013 with an initial class of five students in our Masters in Computer Science (MS CS) program.  At the same time we also created a new graduate degree program in computer science, designed for undergraduates who may not have majored in computer science, but had a degree in a STEM field and wanted to develop expertise and a career in computer science.  We call this ALIGN.  We piloted this in Seattle and are very excited about its potential.  Our first CS ALIGN class in the fall of 2013 had 11 students.

A year later, by fall of 2014, we had 24 students in our MS CS program, and our MS ALIGN program had 42 students.  Northeastern has concluded ALIGN is a successful pilot program and is now adopting it nationwide and expanding it to other subject areas such as Bioinfomatics.  In our first year and a half of enrollment we have reached a total of 66 students in these two CS programs.  In comparison, according to the National Center for Education, all the schools in Washington State graduated a total of 196 graduate masters’ level conferrals in CS in 2013.  This year’s graduating class will make up over a third of this total figure in additionalMS CS graduates in this state.

In Seattle we are certain that our growth will continue in computer science, and our other graduate program areas, which is why we have added a second campus at 225 Terry Ave N.  We will let interested friends and community members know more about our reception to celebrate the new space and thanks to many on our construction team and community friends who have provided strong support for our mission. We can’t wait to welcome you to our new space.

For more about this expansion, check out this Geekwire article.

-Dean Washburn

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