Waiting lists are nothing new in higher education, but for a special program in CECS, it’s schools, not students, that are queued up to get in.
The college’s ACCESS program (Accelerated Coursework in Computer Science and Engineering for Student Success), which debuted in 2007, enrolls academically talented high school juniors and seniors in a special online section of the college’s MSE 101 (Introduction to Engineering) course each fall, earning them two units of college credit. The aim is to interest increasingly diverse students in engineering and computer science and encourage them to enroll at CSUN to pursue their college education.
“It’s very, very popular throughout LAUSD,” says ACCESS coordinator LaTesha Hagler. “There are lots of schools on the waiting list, waiting to bring ACCESS to their high school.”[Read more…]
Last year, when Boeing Corporation was looking for some help designing a new piece of hardware to help solar panels track the sun, they went back to school—to CECS, to be precise—where five graduate students worked with two professors, Bruno Osorno, in Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Stewart Prince, in Mechanical Engineering, to tackle the project.
In 1967, a popular new ride called Adventure Thru Inner Space opened in Disneyland’s Tomorrowland. The ride, which simulated the experience of shrinking down beyond the size of an atom, was closed in 1985 to make way for more modern attractions. But if the research taking place in the Keck Advanced Materials Laboratory at CECS is any indication, today’s advances in nanotechnology are proving the designers’ vision prescient rather than outdated.