Story and successes of Align program earn “Best Paper” at SIGCSE

Like a lot of his students, Logan Schmidt had no programming experience when he entered Khoury College’s Align master’s program for computer science.  

Now an assistant teaching professor and assistant director of computing programs at Northeastern’s Vancouver campus, Schmidt started his higher education journey by earning bachelor’s degrees in English literature and classics, as well as a master’s degree and PhD in rhetoric.  

Now, as an Align alumnus and instructor, Schmidt was both a coauthor and a data point in “An MS in CS for non-CS Majors: A Ten Year Retrospective,” which recently earned a Best Paper Award at SIGCSE, a prominent conference on computing education. The paper, which was authored by Khoury faculty and staff members, broke down the history and results of the Align program, which offers master’s degrees in computer science, data science, and cybersecurity for students from any undergraduate background. 

Despite his humanities background, Schmidt found that computer science was a good match for his research interests, communication and pedagogy methods. As a PhD student in rhetoric at Carnegie Mellon, he wrote his dissertation on how laypeople approach highly technical information and develop or rely on expertise. 

“It was a very short step from helping people understand and process technical information to learning how they join the community of computer science in different ways,” he said. “It may seem like a long way away from English, but it’s not that far.” 

According to Caitlin Kidder, a coauthor of the paper and the director of graduate programs at Northeastern’s Center for Inclusive Computing, the Align program was conceived to broaden the reach of computer science to new demographics and knowledge spheres. 

“Typically, to get admitted to a direct-entry master’s program, you need to have a bachelor’s degree in computer science,” she explained. “When you can pull only from that pool of students, you inherit the demographics of undergraduate CS programs, which for many decades have been very lopsided … meaning not very many women and people of color.” 

There are countless barriers to entry in the computer science world, as both Kidder and Schmidt attest to. Due to the volume of applicants, many undergraduate computing departments have raised GPA requirements or implemented “weed out” courses. This often means that only students who have had the chance to learn computer science in middle and high school or practice programming on the side will make it past the first semester. A lot of students, Schmidt included, did not have this opportunity. 

“I don’t even want to call Align a second chance, because that makes it sound like some people had a first chance, and not everyone did,” Schmidt said. “But it’s an open door that I think has allowed people to come into computer science who might not normally feel encouraged to.”  

In numerous cases, coming from outside fields has benefited Align students in the job market.  

“When you bring in students from extremely diverse backgrounds in terms of individual identity, but also academic experience, work experience, and life experience, you get people who look at problems in different ways and come up with different solutions,” Kidder said.  

Kidder said the program could, for example, help a former biology student move from a biomedical research role to a computational role at their company, or enable a K-12 teacher with a liberal arts background to break into K-12 computer science education and educational technology. Schmidt added that there’s a significant market for programmers with business backgrounds in roles that require both technical skills and business logic. 

Many students still find it tough to move between disciplines. Schmidt said his students frequently confront a frustrating mental block when they don’t grasp a concept immediately, which he remembers facing himself. That’s why an essential tenet of the Align program is confidence-building, aided by a preprogram supplementary math prep course and continual collaborative learning. 

Both Schmidt and Kidder shared that although they believed their work coauthoring the paper was important, the success of the Align program and its alumni are victories even more worthy of celebration. 

“Part of what impressed people at the conference were the results of the Align program, which are the work of hundreds of people,” Schmidt said. “I am just as proud of being a member of the data set as I am of being an author on the paper.” 

Apart from Schmidt and Kidder, the paper’s authors include Ildar Akhmetov, Megan Bebis, Alan Jamieson, Albert Lionelle, Sarah Maravetz, Sami Rollins, and Ethan Selinger.