Changing Your Life with a Career in Computing

Switching Fields Changing jobs is not unusual in 2016 The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics found the median number of years most employees stay with the same employer is 4.2 years. This may take the individual to a new employer in the same industry or they may enter an entirely new industry Change often may be for greater job satisfaction (a recent Gallup report suggests less than a third of employees are engaged at work) or higher pay

Why Computing? Leads to well-paying jobs Glassdoor ranked Computer Science as the top paying college major with a median starting salary of $70K Payscale rated Computer Science as the 7th best paying Masters’ degree with a median starting salary of $95.9K Can provide great job satisfaction Computing has high levels of autonomy, manageable complexity, immediate feedback and allows you to use your professional skills Encourages creativity and has an ubiquitous influence on society

Options Second Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science Master’s degree in Computer Science Pathway #1: Traditional Grad Prep Track Post-bac part-time starts any quarter- could take up to 12 quarters (at one course per term) take selected set of undergraduate courses open admission with GPA requirements Pathway #2: Accelerated New Beginnings program full-time one entry point per year – 3 quarters take specially designed set of courses with a cohort of peers competitive admission

New Option: Biomedical Informatics Pathway In collaboration with Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) Prepares students for admission to the OHSU MS or MBI in Biomedical Informatics, which has two tracks Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Clinical Informatics 2 + 1 format – 2 quarters of New Beginnings then transfer to OHSU for an additional quarter

Program Timeline New Beginnings starts Fall term and ends Spring term. Students take 12 undergraduate credits each quarter of New Beginnings PSU’s CS students will begin their MS coursework Summer quarter OHSU’s Clinical Informatics track will begin MS coursework the Summer quarter OHSU’s Bioinformatics & Computational Biology track will begin MS coursework Fall quarter

New Beginnings Topics – First Quarter Integers Sets Relations Functions Counting Discrete Probability Vectors and Matrices Induction Propositional Logic Predicate Logic Graphs & Trees Boolean Algebra Languages as strings Finite Automata Algorithm and Program Design Data Types and Data Representation Conditionals and Loops Functions and Subprograms I/O Dynamic Memory and Pointers Linear linked lists and Tree Structures Multi-dimensional arrays Data abstraction and implementations Classes and Inheritance Sorting and Searching Data management Correctness, Verification and Testing

New Beginnings Topics – Second Quarter Computer Organization Compiling, linking, binaries Debugging, Make C, C library Number systems, arithmetic Data types/representation Code representation (assembly) Programs to machine code Exceptions Hardware performance Identifying bottlenecks Basic Analysis Brute Force Algorithms Decrease and Conquer Transform and Conquer Divide and Conquer Greedy Algorithms Dynamic Programming Other algorithms Complexity

New Beginnings Topics – Third Quarter (Computer Science) Operating system services File systems Resource management Synchronization Processes, process cooperation and interference Introduction to networks Protection and security Foundations of computing Regular languages and finite automata. Context-free languages and pushdown automata Turing machines and equivalent models of computation Computability Introduction to complexity

New Beginnings Topics – Third Quarter (Biomedical Informatics – to be finalized) Bioinformatics & Computational Biology prerequisites Genetics Statistics (more to be added) Clinical Informatics prerequisites Anatomy and Physiology Statistics (more to be added)

Enrichment Days Every Friday Presentations by faculty on their research and interests Field trips to local software companies Hackathons and programming contests

Admissions Applications are now open - priority deadline is March 1st Required Qualifications: GRE Quantitative score in the 70th percentile or higher and a Verbal score in the 50th percentile or higher Test date must be no older than 3 years Preferred Qualifications: At least a year of math beyond pre-calculus linear algebra, calculus, etc. Undergraduate GPA of 3.5 Interviews begin in March – priority decisions in April Students accepted to New Beginnings will be asked to complete a Post-bac Application for the University

Ready to apply? Contact the CS Graduate Advisor at gccs@pdx.edu to request an application Applications must be complete to be considered. Complete applications include GRE scores (no older than 3 years) and undergraduate transcripts (unofficial OK)