<p>I get messages and newletters from Viterbi but never hear anything from the actual Computer Science dept. Who is the chairman? Do they ever have events with all the CS majors? How about meetings with all the Games or Business/CS majors? Are there CS student interest groups? Programming groups? Robotics groups?</p>
<p>The only person I hear about is Steve Strador who I think is the advisor/guidance counselor type person. Is there a CS mentoring program with faculty and students?</p>
<p>The new chair is Shang-Hua Teng (just arrived from Boston University)</p>
<p>The main CS focused student groups are UPE and ACM, UPE being the honors association and ACM being the general CS student organization. Both UPE and ACM do events for all CS students.</p>
<p>There is a CS colloquium series with invited speakers from other universities on current research, but this is typically more interesting to graduate students (undergrads welcome of course)</p>
<p>There is a annual/semi-annual programming contest typically once per semester, open to all students.</p>
<p>I don’t think there is any formal program for coordinating between students and faculty, (except for the engineering honors program, which tries to link students with mentors in their dept), but it is not that hard to do informally, to find a professor in an area you’re interested in to offer career/grad school guidance.</p>
<p>jbusc is right. To give you a little background about myself: I’m an undergraduate senior majoring in Computer Engineering & Computer Science. Now, a bit more detail regarding your questions…</p>
<p>I was the President of UPE (Upsilon Pi Epsilon) last school year. UPE is the international honor society for computer science, with endorsements from ACM and IEEE. The website for the USC chapter of UPE is at [upe.usc.edu[/url</a>]. Much of it is out-of-date at the moment, but you can browse around to get an idea of what we do. We help to organize and run the USC Programming Contest ([url=<a href=“http://contest.usc.edu/]contest.usc.edu[/url”>http://contest.usc.edu/]contest.usc.edu[/url</a>], which is held once each semester.</p>
<p>Next year, I’m thinking about starting a programming group for iPhone app development. It would be a recurring iPhone app hackathon, perhaps a few times a month. Would you be interested?</p>
<p>There is a [url=<a href=“http://ilab.usc.edu/uscr/]USC”>Bootstrap 101 Template]USC</a> Robotics Club](<a href=“http://upe.usc.edu/]upe.usc.edu[/url”>http://upe.usc.edu/) which builds and programs an autonomous submarine.</p>
<p>Steve Schrader is the Director of Student Affairs in the CS Dept, and yes, he acts as an advisor.</p>
<p>For mentoring, you’d want to get in touch with someone more technical - so that would be one of the CS professors. They have open office hours, and it’s easy to talk to them before and/or after class.</p>