Memories of Notre Dame

The following is a podcast spent reflecting on the time we have spent at Notre Dame put together by Michael King, Peter Forbes, and Ryan Boccabella. We hope you enjoy listening to it.

The podcast.

Bringing CS Into Primary Education

Technology is certainly taking the world by storm and new devices at new speeds are being churned out at exponentially increasing rates. This brings up not only an additional need for good computer scientists to be produced from high caliber schools, but also the idea of bringing computer science into public education, and to what degree it should be forced on students. Some people think that coding is a new type of literacy and should be a routine part if not a required course in most high schools.

There are some roadblocks to this idea. For one, there are not many computer science teachers out there who can fill in a massive employment void if one is created by the CS4All initiative. Another concern is that it will take away from the core math and science courses which are being taught, and that money poured into these programs will be wasted or mishandled like Zuckerberg’s Newark gift. In my opinion, though, everyone should be exposed to programming at some point in their educational career, and the reason is two fold. For one, it can enthrall students at a young age and convince them to pursue careers as computer scientists, and fill in the (perhaps present, as has been discussed previously) lack of American talent in the tech industry. Additionally, like math and science, computer programming teaches critical thinking skills and teaches you to approach problems in an algorithmic way. Regardless of what a student wants to learn in high school and where their interests lie most, the goal of high school is to promote learning and exposure in all areas, and so just as I had to take art classes in high school I believe that those who most love art should partake in computer science courses because you will hopefully learn something from it. It should be a required semester course and integrate with the math and science curricula, and should focus mainly on logic and algorithmic thinking, with less immediate focus on coding and languages. I feel that this would help students in the way they approach math and science problems because if you can get them to understand the idea of a function, they might just get better at breaking large problems into a series of easily solvable sub-problems. Hopefully, further electives would be offered to supplement the required course.

I think that everyone can learn to program, but not everyone can learn to program well. People’s minds are wired differently and that diversity is a beautiful thing. I’m not saying that people can’t progress through hard work, but like in any other arena your parents were lying to you when you were young and said that you could do anything and that hard work beats talent that doesn’t work hard. If you’re not a freak athlete you’re not going to make it as a professional sports player, and if you don’t have the mindset for it it’s incredibly difficult to learn to be a great programmer no matter how hard you try. Work ethic always plays a role, but sometimes hard work can’t beat talent that works at it with a mediocre effort level. So I say, although everyone should be exposed to programming and can grasp the basic concepts, if it doesn’t tickle your fancy, you don’t need to learn how to code much more than a single semester. Even if everything becomes automated and coding becomes much more prevalent, people will still need to configure and use the hardware and software that is being produced because it will be a long time before computers can do absolutely everything for us.

Bladerunner In Review Podcast

This mp3 file (which is found through a link to Google Drive) is a podcast by Michael King, Peter Forbes, and Ryan Boccabella which discusses the role and portrayal of Artificial Intelligence in the movie “Bladerunner.” We hope that you enjoy it. You can play it using the avplay utility available for Linux.

 

 

“Hey! Watch your keyboard!”

Unbeknownst to most Americans is the feeling that your opinion will be hushed by the government or the content that you wish to upload (provided it doesn’t directly harm someone else, and sometimes even then) will be disallowed is foreign. The only things which deter us from sharing our opinions online, often as colorfully as we like, is perhaps the fear of trolls or the thought that maybe the internet won’t stoop to validating us in our cries for attention.

Perhaps I exaggerated and generalized a bit there, but it was to illustrate the point that whenever we go online, we can often say and find whatever tickles our fancy that day. Information is at our fingertips and the news is, although heavily biased many times, available and usually accurate even if twisted a little bit. Unfortunately, as an American I feel unfortunate for those who are on the outside and can’t even look in, because the internet which would give them the information about their being unable to get all the information available in the world is being censored and restricted by the government. It’s sickeningly recursive in its nature.

This raises the question of whether or not a government should be able to, as China’s does, route all traffic through a few central routers with packet sniffers, and replace packets it doesn’t like with “Site not found” error messages, or if each individual has a natural right to information and the internet. It seems sensible that the people of China should be able to know what is going on within their country, especially in regards to major national news like, oh I don’t know, uprisings and violence in Tibet.

And in some cases, software companies are even tailoring their software to meet the censorship laws in different countries just so that they are permitted to operate there. Google did it with a specialized search engine in China for awhile, and Yahoo! turned over account information to the Chinese government which incriminated a journalist there for trying to disseminate what seems to be truthful information and a warning to journalists in the United States regarding coverage of a social uprising. Although the code being written and services being provided might not comply with the United State’s version of human rights, I do not fault these companies for trying to turn a profit elsewhere by complying with the idea of rights that exists in other cultures. It is not the responsibility of each company that exists in America to forcefully bear her colors and ideals in every corner of the international market where it operates.

But sometimes it isn’t so clear cut, and censorship can become a major issue. It seems evident that sometimes the ideals of the country don’t align with those of the public, and this manifests itself in situations like those in Egypt and Tunisia. Maybe it becomes an issue of basic human rights, the right to try and affect what you see as positive change where you are living, when the ability to revolt against a government is being hindered by the inability to use technology. When that government is restricting internet access and only jailing people, such as Mostafa, who are amidst those leading the revolt, it can certainly be a big blow to those who are revolting in terms of mobilizing people and sharing ideas.

In my eyes, though, it is not any software company’s battle to fight unless they want to, as a company, take a stance and fight it. If that company wishes to aid in the fight against certain laws in certain places because they stand for it, that’s fine by me, but I don’t believe that they are obligated to try and press America’s version of freedom into other countries’ ways of life.

In the same sense, I applaud those who are willing to take the risk of sacrificing everything for a cause they believe in when they try to circumvent these government regulations. Civil disobedience such as this is often how change happens, and most times it results in change for the better. So although the laws which are attempting to represent the ideals and beliefs in a country’s culture may prohibit it, if the people are motivated enough to risk their well being to change those laws and don’t have better means to do so I back them.

Immigration and Technology

I don’t want to lose my job. No one wants to lose their job, especially after working so hard to train for it through education, applying and searching for employment, and dedicating years of your life to it. If I lose a competition for a job to a candidate that is better qualified or better for for the job than myself,  I concede that perhaps I wasn’t the right candidate, and if I’m performing poorly, or my company goes under, or our market is shrinking and production is slowing, I’m okay with having to move on and find another job. To be perfectly honest, though, this is not terribly concerning to me. I have a fantastic education, a great understanding of the problem solving concepts in my field, and will soon have a degree and plenty of workplace experience, so I think that my continually growing talent will be marketable and desirable for innovative companies. Despite the fact that I believe in the free market for the competition of produced goods, I think that employers owe their employees a measure of loyalty once they make a hiring decision. This loyalty should extend beyond a small severance payment, especially if that severance is contingent on training your replacement as was the case for Disney. Now I’ve never owned a business, so sometimes loyalty to your loyal employees is inconvenient or even fiscally impossible, and perhaps I’m pampered by employers seemingly pining over our talent to the point where it seems they owe us something, but I don’t find it ethical to just let people go like that for cheaper, foreign labor.

The current controversy about the H1-B Visa program has a couple of facets. Firstly, it seems that a program originally designed to help fill demonstrable voids in American talent has been repeatedly expanded and is being “abused” to cut cost of labor. The other is that there is a hard cap on the number of available visas and the applications are not reviewed on a case by case basis and a lottery is used instead, making it so that outsourcing companies are obtaining a vast majority of the visas and leaving entrepreneurs such as Theo Negri out in the cold. There seems to be an argument for expanding the program right here, in that more legitimate users of the visa program would have visas granted, and that these workers can help improve American companies and bring them increased success because of their unique skills. Those against expansion argue that American jobs are being lost and those Americans who do get jobs are in lesser demand and thus end up with lower salaries. Finally, there is a debate about whether or not there is truly a shortage in technical knowledge and training among the American people, and there are statistics being used to back both sides.

I am of the belief that all sides need to work together to solve the H1-B program’s problems, and this will not necessarily occur through expansion or restriction of the number of visas. It’s cliche I know, but there are actually concrete steps everyone involved can take to lower the amount of “abuse” of the H1-B program. For one, the process of selecting applications needs to be reformed such that companies applying for the visas must somehow prove that they have done a thorough search of the states for the talent they need, and also prove that the candidate in question has the skills being cited as absent in the American workforce, and it is on those distributing the visas to do this leg-work and application reading rather than going to a lottery and rubber stamping each application. I realize that this might be unfeasible given the number of applicants and the available resources, but progress toward this end must be made. At the same time, Americans need to get off their high horse and put a little elbow grease into their own situations. Although our college system can certainly help individuals learn about themselves as individuals, many people overextend themselves and do not focus enough on their studies to truly grasp the material. In the field of computer science, I think this separates those with computer science knowledge from those with coding knowledge, which is what we are mostly graded on. If we have the opportunity to differentiate ourselves from foreign candidates through our training but fail to take advantage of it and end up with similar technical skills, it is unfair to the companies hiring for us to demand higher wages than those which foreign candidates of equal caliber are willing to accept. Given this, if the H1-B program can effectively bring in talented workers and help American companies succeed, I say we should expand the program. We ought to protect our citizens’ interests and opportunities, but this nation was built on immigrants and hard work, and if our current citizens are not willing to put the work in to earn the wages they require, we should keep adding to the melting pot.

Stance on Encryption and Government Surveillance

Due to the recent case regarding Apple and the FBI, wherein the FBI asked Apple to unlock the iPhone of a perpetrator of a mass shooting, there has been a lot of conversation about encryption and what the government should and should not be able to see.

In response to this, two classmates and I wrote this letter to the junior Indiana Senator Joe Donnelly, and I fully support the stance that it takes on the issue of encryption: that both producers and consumers of technology should have the ability to create and use technology which entirely locks the government out.

Although I do not believe that encryption is a fundamental right in and of itself, it certainly makes sense to me that a person should be able to have secrets and that they should be able to protect their thoughts, ideas, and secrets from whomever they choose. I think that inherently we as citizens and business owners have a right to privacy and a minimization of government intervention, such that if someone wants a way to protect personal information and a corporation can fill that need, the government should stay out of it. Although there are some situations, such as plotting terror attacks, which the technology can be used for and that government access to that technology can be used to prevent, the ability for the government to investigate on any small whim or inkling seems overly invasive to me.

Although for me encryption is not a terribly important issue at the time being, I could certainly see it becoming one if I have a breakthrough idea that I would want to keep as a trade secret or develop more before applying for a patent. Although I am not immediately affected by the issue now, I can see where a company or politician stands on the issue of encryption affecting who I support monetarily or with my vote, although it is likely that the quality of the product or other bigger ticket issues would carry more weight in my decision making process. In terms of who I socialize with, I am unlikely to change who I spend my time with based on this issue, provided that they are not consistently bringing it up and questioning me on it. However, people like that I would be unlikely to socialize with regardless of the issue they are pushing. I can see where the issue of encryption might carry significant weight in a person’s purchasing and political decisions, and believe that it should for an individual carry as much weight as that individual chooses to give it. The beautiful thing about America and our free market and democracy is that we can financially and politically change our support based on a variety of different factors and for the most part we can choose what those issues are. So, if someone is passionate about the issue of encryption and government back doors, it should certainly affect their social, financial, and political choices.

Although I am not sure who will eventually win the struggle between the always cited “national security” and personal privacy, I can foresee the government slowly but surely taking more and more power into their own hands, although I don’t know if they will ever be able to require companies to build in special government access measures. I personally am resigned to whichever way this issue ends up going, and although I might put up weak resistance to it based on who I vote or how I act, the only way that I will put up a hard fight is if I see the government gaining and significantly abusing access to citizen’s private files and data.

DMCA’s Implications on Piracy

The DMCA doesn’t seem to say anything explicit about piracy, but it does dictate who the burden for not infringing on copyright. The person who actually does pirate the material is responsible for the infringement of the copyright, and the service or website on which that material was made available  does not take any of the blame because of “safe harbor” clauses. This protects those who host websites and the internet service providers who provide general services from the burden of closely reviewing all of their content and risking damaging suits for wrong judgement calls. In response for those protections these sites are required to have a quick and easy way to have your content removed if you claim that it infringes on copyright, but upon a successful challenge by a user the content can be re-posted. The DMCA also prevents users from bypassing attempts to protect copyrighted material.

In the general I am of the opinion that breaking the law is immoral and unethical, so in that sense it is certainly not okay for a user to download or share copyrighted material, especially because the creator of that material is not getting any credit or compensation for that copy of the material. As a consumer, you are responsible for knowing what you are buying and how you can or cannot use what you’ve purchased. If you’ve purchased a handgun, you do so under certain laws and are required to handle that gun responsibly, get the required permits/background checks, and not use that gun to break any laws or hurt anyone. Although the possibility of immediate harm is higher with a gun than when making a copy of protected material, you need to know what rights you have to use and reproduce that material. Once you purchase that material, it makes sense that you should be able to make copies of it and transform it into different representations, because you have already paid for the entertainment value that it provides. However, the purpose of making that copy should only be to change the way the user can enjoy it. Unfortunately, you’ve got to draw the line on how things can be copied and redistributed so that you can’t have one person buy a copy of an album and freely share it with the whole world, so placing the restriction on the copying of the material is sensible. In terms of sampling or testing material, that is up to artist or creator of the material. If the would like to offer a sample before purchase, they can loosen the restrictions on copying their material.

I personally have not participated in the sharing of copyrighted material, but it makes sense to me that the ease of pirating material and not having to pay per copy makes it difficult to resist, especially when compared to the alternative of clicking “I agree to pay $0.99 for [to license] this song.” Buying the song not only costs 99 cents, it also costs the knowledge and guilt that you are making a purchase out of your hard earned pay check.

This is why streaming services such as Netflix and Spotify have seriously cut back on piracy, and why I feel no guilt as I sit here and binge on Parks and Recreation on Netflix. You see, they put an $8 charge on my credit card at the end of last month and the only reason I saw that charge is because I made sure to check my card statement very closely after spring break. I might feel bad paying 3 cents per episode and seeing those charges stack up while I’m trying to procrastinate might actually encourage me to do my work, but under this model of paying monthly fees for (or seeing/hearing ads with streaming services) gives the feeling of free entertainment with the convenience of it being on demand. Although piracy is a real problem, it seems like a very solvable problem with the dawn of these services causing cuts in piracy. As the pirating sites become harder to find and keep up for long periods of time, and as the generation that grew up expecting music for free becomes older and the next generation of children gets used to streaming services they will begin to see electricity and phone plans, omnipresent and not free. Although piracy may never be entirely solved, it can certainly be reduced to a problem whose scale is small enough that the government can focus on other issues, which seems to already be the trend.

Fasten Your Seatbelts: Clouds Will Be Creating Some Turbulence

I’ve played goaltender for ice hockey since a young age, and from very early on in my “career” I’ve had coaches telling me a seemingly oversimplified, but very true statement, movement creates holes, and holes are bad. What we are seeing in the tech industry over the past decade is a movement from desktop applications and company per company databases to Software as a Service, Computing as a Service, and Storage as a Service. In addition to these transitions, the era of personal computing has taken hold, and a number of the applications we use on our laptops, tablets, and phones rely on “the cloud” for their computing power.

What precisely is “the cloud?” This is a very difficult question to answer, and I’d say it’s a term that is too broad. Simply having a large internal network of computers constitutes a “private cloud,” in some people’s minds, but to me this is just having a private network on which you can compute. Because of the broad use of the buzz words, it is unsurprising that three different articles define cloud computing in three overlapping but non-identical ways. One article over-broadly defines it as “an efficient method of managing lots of computer servers, data storage, and networking.” Another says that it is the “applications delivered as services over the Internet and the hardware and systems software in the data centers that provide those services,” while a research paper on the ethics of cloud computing makes its definition by a laundry list of characteristics that must be met.

For me, to be doing “cloud computing” means having and using an available a pool of seemingly infinite resources to use at will to meet your storage and computing needs. Currently, only public clouds (or the private clouds of the companies that own them) can meet this definition for me as anything less than a seemingly infinite pool of resources (private cloud for a company where you can’t just ask for another machine) or where other jobs might preempt yours (condor) is in my idea of shared and distributed computing. Anything where you are not calling on those resources yourself, such as an application which uses on cloud services in the background, is not at your level cloud computing, but a service which uses cloud computing to serve its consumers and might consequently inherit some of the risks associated with cloud computing.

The issue with the public cloud is that the movement to it is creating holes in the ethics we’ve already established within the field of computing, and a research paper. This paper raises a number of ethical concerns that resonate with me, including issues of monopoly and lock-in, a scenario in which consumers put more and more data into a public cloud, but must pay for the strain on the network to transfer all of their data if they want to move to another cloud service. Other ethical issues that arise are how changes in service agreements are becoming blurred when software services which rely on the cloud fail due to a failure somewhere in the stack of cloud based services. And of course, something that always concerned me about cloud computing is the amount of data we’re putting up into supposedly but perhaps insecure hands. A hack of AWS could be devastating to both AWS and its users whose information has been lost or stolen. Companies have even gone out of business due to the FBI slowing down operations in a cloud provider which they were relying on for their day to day operations. These issues cannot all be solved or discussed here, but it is certain that the movement toward cloud computing has raised some issues that must be discussed.

I don’t personally use many SaaS such to store or back up my personal data. The only thing I backup is my Android phone’s contacts, everything else I like to keep on my local disk. I’m sure that many applications I use rely on cloud services, but it is unlikely that this will come back to bite me personally, as a number of other consumers would be effected and there would likely be a class action suit. The benefits include better service, likely at a lower cost because the service itself saves on input costs. The risks include some loss of personal data, which  I try to mitigate by avoiding applications which ask for information beyond my email address and phone number. I am slow to pick up on apps and websites which require credit card numbers until they have shown to be trustworthy with other customers’ data.

As a developer I’ve used the cloud during Professor Thain’s cloud computing class, exploring AWS and condor as part of the learning exercises. I’ve also used it for one small iPhone app that I helped develop during a hackathon that gave us a scalable database for game states. The benefits are clear, as they allow you to pay for only what you need when you need it if you are capable of writing code to respond to rises and falls in hits to your service. There were many proofs of concept of how to scale to demand presented as final projects in the cloud computing class, and they seemed to give good algorithms on how to use instances as wisely as possible and scale to demand. It also showed how it can save significant time in running parallelizable jobs, which may be worth the cost of the instances, for scientific simulations or sifting through big data. The drawbacks are the costs of a bug which accidentally instantiates many instances, the transferring of customers’ data to another company’s machines, and the potential of outages which aren’t you’re fault affecting your service. These are outweighed in my mind by the flexibility afforded by on demand instances (which would likely be more reliable than your own machines) and the ability to conserve costs and power using on demand resources.

Taking a Bite Out Of A Sour Apple

The interesting case of a court demanding that Apple unlock a single iPhone has opened up a whole new can of worms in the domain of governing computing and communication that occurs over the internet. The thought that Apple would be asked to “break into” on of their own devices is at first a little bit off-putting, as it should be. After all, we keep a number of private conversations and images or documents on every device now, considering that a phone has the same or greater capability than most computers from 20 years ago. I certainly agree with Apple’s claim that once they build in a single piece of “malware” to break into one of their devices, that code, if it gets into the wrong hands, can be used over and over again as a “master key” to break into any number of iPhones, and thus writing such a code comes with the grave responsibility of keeping it under close wraps. Having taken a cryptography course where we learned that the best cryptographic systems are ones where the algorithm is public and only the key is private (and not used for a large number of transmissions), this need for a physical level of security around the malware does seem daunting. Furthermore, if Apple were to budge and write the malware, the precedent it would set is both a slippery slope of tech companies taking dev time to serve the needs all sorts of warrants made under the All Writs Act and an opening of the door to government legislation of encryption schemes for big companies. I’m really don’t think that the government needs to snoop on the phone of a dead terrorist to raise more evidence against him and his co-conspirator.

Unfortunately, I can’t see any merit behind the government forcing large companies like Apple and Google to take time to build backdoors into the systems that they’ve taken so long to and put so much are into building securely. This feels to me like the government is taking the high levels of privacy we’ve achieved in the field of computer science and turning it into a controlled substance. If only the big companies that sold phones were required to build in backdoors, this doesn’t change the mathematics behind cryptography, and it will just go to a black market where developers are contracted privately to anonymously author code which provides secure channels of communication for terrorists and others scheming evil.

There is a good counterargument to my stance in the claim “If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear,” because one would hope that our government would only be using the data they obtain when they need to and for the right purposes. Even if you have something a little bit embarrassing on your phone or laptop, one would hope that the government agency would only see it if you’re under suspicion and, if it has no relevance to their investigation, that they would ignore it and pretend like they never saw it. However, given the NSA’s recent behavior and the fact that government agencies are made up of imperfect humans who can abuse their power, this is not the level of trust that a lot of Americans have in their government when it comes to being watched by “big brother.” The back door would have to have some sort of an accountability check in, making it even harder to invent and implement.

I enjoyed the article by Benjamin Wittes as I thought it brought up fair arguments against my stance, especially regarding the validity of the claim that he security risks the computer scientists are claiming will be introduced by built in backdoors are “grave.” The arguments he makes originally seem very persuasive, but they seem flawed to me. In my mind, however, it is still very dangerous to build in a single point of failure, that is a backdoor, to your code because it becomes a great place for hackers to focus on and it has a very high reward. Although code bases are expanded all of the time, expanding one to put a new single point of failure in, with fresh-rolled, untested cryptography which the government might just pass legislation requiring, is dangerous. Unless there is a proven system for ensuring that only person X with a warrant can, but can easily, decrypt a past communication, the government can’t force a company to implement such a non-existent policy. Even if that policy did exist, a flawed implementation of the system could be devastating and would be more likely to be attacked and contain perhaps more valuable data than any other secrets tech companies are trying to keep.

I find it peculiar that as the Wittes article says, code can become “the world’s largest ungoverned space,” if legislation is not put in soon regarding communications over it. I think that it would be great if the government could catch all of the bad guys in a perfectly ethical manner all of the time, but in case like these, it’s not perfect, and the system that could make it a trustworthy process does not exist and requires the not-so-trusted government to be a player. I think that if the government wants a back door, they’re going to have to do the math and the proofs themselves and get their system scrutinized by the cryptography public before making it a standard, because it is too great a burden to put on the tech companies to, by some certain date, comply with a standard for building in backdoors, asking them to either just drop their current level of security and make their systems more vulnerable, or to come up with a new algorithm entirely by then.

Helping Others Land Jobs

From what I have experienced, the most difficult part of finding a job coming from ND was getting my foot in the door while trying to overcome a bout of impostor’s syndrome. I was trying desperately to get an internship for the summer after my sophomore year during the fall of my sophomore year, with half a semester of C under my belt and a measly MATLAB side project I had been working on over the summer. And although I knew our curriculum was behind Cornell’s because of the First Year of Studies, I couldn’t help but compare myself to my sister who had gotten an internship with Google after her sophomore year. I knew that I knew almost nothing about the world of computing and had just started on one of the most basic languages there is, and was stacked against a bunch of juniors who had started in high school or at least during their freshman year of college and  already knew at least 2 or 3 languages. When I finally got one interview, I was scared out of my mind and started preparing right away for the upcoming interview, crash coursing myself on object oriented concepts that I had never heard of before, on Java because that’s what the company primarily used, and on the company culture and values in case I needed to impress them on that. It worked, and I got my foot in the door, which lead to a more prestigious junior summer internship and a post graduation job which I am pleased with. Luckily, I had my sister to guide me through the process, giving me tips, suggestions on what to study and how to talk through my solution and ask clarification questions during the interview, and even giving me mock questions during when she was home for Christmas, as the interview turned out to be in January. Our document does its best to include all of this advice throughout the main sections, and I was happy to know all of that interview advice as early as I did. For awhile I had a sort of guilt that I had been able to use such a great resource when I know so many of my classmates didn’t have that chance . The most important piece of advice my sister gave me, though, was incredibly simple, “Remember to stay calm and think through the problem because you’re smart.” That was all it took for me, a reminder to keep my head and rely on my perhaps technically under-qualified, but certainly logical and critical thinking, mind. And we include in what I believe to be our strongest portion of the document, the ramblings by experienced students, this piece of advice.

One thing I wish I had known earlier, given that I had so much information about the process so early on, is that having a sophomore year internship is useful, but certainly isn’t a deal breaker when it comes to junior year internships. Knowing this would have certainly softened the blow I would have felt if I had not received an offer that year, and it’s something that I would have liked to have been able to share with underclassmen sooner. I saw a lot of my friends who after sophomore year either didn’t have internships, or who had internships that weren’t very technical, getting placed at fantastic companies before the start of the school year.

Notre Dame, along with a number of other universities, is facing the reality that although we are educating our students primarily, most of the students here want that education to translate into a job offer upon graduation rather than getting a degree and going through the courses just for the sake of obtaining knowledge. I don’t think that this calls for a change in the curriculum though, at least not toward training for interviews and resumes. The ND CSE department is doing an excellent job of helping more sophomores place by taking steps to appropriately accelerate the curriculum to match the pace of other top CSE programs across the country, but this need not include training for interviews. The career centers at these schools are responsible for taking helping  those students at the university who want to translate their education into a marketable set of skills that they can use to achieve gainful employment. The rise of these technical interviews has not been matched by career centers, and the career centers should be working with the CSE departments not to change the curricula to include job training, but rather to help the career centers develop useful resources for students who require technical interviews while  the CSE department encourages students early and often in their academic careers to go to the career center for assistance in finding job openings and acing interviews.