Why RMC for Computer Science?

You are not a number at Rocky Mountain College. Our classes are relaxed, our class sizes are small, and our contact hours are high both in lecture and lab settings. Students and professors are on a first-name basis and the learning experiences don't stop just because class is over.

In the computer science program, we believe that the root skill of computer science is a competence in computer programming, and our early curriculum works to develop programmers that are capable of building complex pieces of software earlier than many other skills. We teach the software engineering "design patterns" technique in the second semester - far earlier than in most curricula. While many schools make the emphasis of their second course building a large application, we have found that teaching design patterns provides a way to think about program organization that enables us to go much deeper in subsequent courses.

For students with prior experience, we offer an accelerated freshmen sequence that gets students into the upper-level classes in their second semester at RMC. When you've been doing multiplication, there's no reason to have to go back and relearn addition.

Our curriculum exposes students to at least five different programming languages and often more. Nobody can predict when the language du jour will be in four years, but when you have five languages under your belt by the time you leave RMC, the thought of having to learn another isn't nearly as intimidating.

Finally, for students thinking about graduate school, we have an active research program. While bigger schools talk about their research opportunities for undergraduates, the fact is that in most places graduate students do most of the research and the undergraduates often end up washing the test tubes. At RMC, the undergraduates are in charge. Current projects include multiple teams in bioinformatics and computer cognition, and past projects have included work on distributed/parallel systems and robotics.

All in all, the computer science program at RMC offers big opportunities in a small place.