Student Life & Resources

Student in the CSSE office suite psyching themselves up for final exams

Students sitting on the floor of the CSSE office suite

Three students and Prof. Rybarczyk in Halloween costumes

Student Groups

Our student chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) runs and/or supports a wide variety of events. On Trivia Nights, which happen every semester, teams of students compete against teams of faculty, while eating pizza. The ACM chapter also sponsors Game Nights (board and video games both) and Laser Tag with the Mathematical Sciences department. Sometimes student teams compete in the ACM Regional Programming Contest. We occasionally do quite well, having beaten much bigger schools such as Purdue, IU, and Notre Dame in the past. We have also sent students to hackathons and done well. Our ACM chapter also sponsors the occasional evening speaker.

Women of CSSE luncheon at the ResCo dorm dining hall

Student Sarah Norville showing the CSSE banner she made for us

We have an informal women+ in computing group that meets regularly, often over lunch. Butler’s Women in STEM group welcomes computing students as well.

In addition to ACM activities, the department sponsors a senior lunch in the spring for that year’s graduating class. The first-ever Gupta Guzzler event, hosted by Prof. Ankur Gupta, was held at an area restaurant. We competed against the Mathematical Sciences department in volleyball at the Health and Recreation Center. We also took them on in our custom-made olympics-style event called the UNvitational. There was chair-iot racing, a rock-paper-scissors tournament, and other similar events. You can find additional pictures on our department Instagram site.

Vollyball players for CSSE against the math department

Students at the first Gupta Guzzler, held at Chili's

Lab Facilities

Our department is on the west end of historic Jordan Hall, where we have three dedicated classroom labs. These three rooms are available for students to use between classes and in the evenings. We also have a student lab with ample whiteboards, tables for collaboration on projects, and large wall-mounted screens usable with your laptop. There is a fridge, a microwave, and a printer in the student lab. Most students use their own laptops, but each of the labs has windows machines, plus the student lab has a pair of macs.

In addition to the lab computers, most of our courses make use of the campus linux server, named Thomas, which has 112 cores. All Butler students have access to this machine. We also have a small cluster, named Big Dawg, that has 560 cores. Students can get access to this research machine if they have a project that needs that level of CPU power. We also have several GPUs available for machine learning projects.

Tutoring and Academic Support

There are lots of ways to get help on your projects and homework. The department sponsors free peer tutoring, Monday through Thursday evenings, in our classroom lab in Jordan Hall 174. There is a student workspace that we call the Fish Bowl in the department office suite. It’s a great place to hang out and work, and if you have a question, the faculty are only a few steps away. All our faculty hold office hours – time set aside to help students who come to their offices with questions. Some of our courses can be quite challenging, so we make sure our students have plenty of support available to them.

Code Jam finals week coding project event

Abi Sipes and Prof. Ankur Gupta in his office

At the end of each semester, Prof. Ryan Rybarczyk sponsors our department Code Jam, a long evening, usually held in Jordan Hall 174, for students to work on final semester projects. There’s plenty of pizza, and usually candy or other sweets, to fuel the work session. Most of the faculty drop by Code Jam for at least part of the time to help their students.

Career Planning

We have a number of ways of supporting our students as they plan for a career. All our majors are required to take our CS311 Vocational Exploration course, where students learn how to build a good resume, set up a solid LinkedIn profile, and learn about the many types of jobs available to computing majors. Our Tech Talk series brings in recent alumni and other area computing professionals to talk about their careers and answer student questions. We share internship opportunities with our students, and help them build a network and find opportunities. We also help them figure out what career path fits them best, including the possibility of doing research and graduate school. All of us are invested in the success and happiness of our students, whatever form that takes.