CS50 and Leaving the KIND Bars Behind

Logoed t-shirt, KIND bar at your desk, endless supply of both. Free breakfast, free lunch, free dinner, as long as you stay to work. Code on your screen, code on your mind. But you could use a break so you elevator down to the gym. You stop by the custom espresso machine. Towels provided. No need to bring shampoo.

Working in big tech is comfortable not just because your work life is well-endowed, but also because it’s so analogous to college. Roll out of bed, go to class, do some work, eat some food, go to sleep, do it again. It’s the kind of lifestyle where you rarely have to think about the things that facilitate fundamental activities like eating (cooking, grocery shopping, etc.).

At Harvard, future engineers receive a sneak peek at life after college through Computer Science 50. Walk into any CS50 event, whether it’s Puzzle Day, the first lecture of the semester, or the annual Hackathon for those slaving away on their final projects. You ought to be surprised if you don’t walk out with a full belly, a free t-shirt, some bumper stickers, (and maybe slightly worse vision?) It’s almost as if the pain of all-nighters and impossible problem sets is merely the price you pay for what are now considered rite-of-passage “Harvard experiences,” like receiving an ice pop from David Malan walking around Annenberg at 12:30AM.

By the time you hand in your last p-set for CS50, it is hard to imagine “doing tech” any other way. In fact, big tech companies catch CS50 students at just that moment when they come out to recruit at culminating events like the CS50 Fair. The students wearing Quora and Facebook shirts around campus likely have never worked for the company. Rather, these t-shirts symbolize the cycle facilitated by the large tech companies that sponsor the glamorous perks of taking CS50, a course that has become an icon, and a brand, on campus.

As a CS50 alum, I still stand in awe of the scale at which Harvard’s introductory computer science course runs, the creativity evident in its curriculum and the extent to which student involvement makes it all possible. But I also ponder, often and deeply, on whether it also might have given me a limited understanding of what technical literacy means in the context of our larger society. While its growth trajectory so far is understandable as a means towards making computer science more attractive and approachable for students, I believe the next great step that CS50 can take is to introduce its students to the impact their skills can make in the realm of public service.

Indeed, the need for elite yet humble technical talent is skyrocketing in the public sector right now, and with the initiation of exciting projects like the U.S. Digital Service, it is not an exaggeration to say that the time is now. As a social studies student who has not continued coding after CS50, I helplessly observed through my summer internships and field research that many important things are broken, many necessary things are nonexistent, and that staff and budgetary resource problems perpetuate this situation.

The problem that these public sector employers face in recruiting talent is twofold. They lack the opportunities to visit campus and recruit at the level of perk-ridden private sector companies, and they lack the glitz needed to appeal to a student population that has been habitualized to the charm of big tech culture.

Given the difference that socially minded and service-oriented technical talent can make today, CS50 has the potential to make an unprecedented impact on communities, cities, states, and countries around the world. This is not to say that the course should not do all the wonderful things it currently has in store for its students; in fact, the “cool factor” of CS50 is indispensable in drawing students to pick-up a skill with endless potential to better our society. But perhaps with a heavier emphasis on understanding our technical capacity as a public asset, more students will pick up the initiative and courage to leave the KIND bars behind.

Jenny J. Choi ’16 is a social studies concentrator in Winthrop House. Her column appears on alternate Fridays.