Computer science is the study of what can be computed or automated by the computer. Our program emphasizes the design, implementation and testing of software systems, a field called software engineering. You are introduced to the object-oriented design methodology of software engineering in the first major course, which is utilized throughout the curriculum. The capstone, Software Engineering, brings together techniques introduced during your course of study to design a large software system.

Bonaventure graduates go into one of five areas in industry:

Demand for entry-level IT professionals remains strong. You can expect a starting salary in the 40's.

The average class size for lower division courses is 20 -25, for upper division courses 15 – 25. Labs for lower division courses have between 12 and 16 students.

Our emphasis is on software design and implementation. If you are interested in designing and building computer hardware, you should look for a computer-engineering program. Two in New York State you might visit are Clarkson and RPI.

We recommend a laptop with both an Ethernet and wireless card for accessing the University's local area network. The University has high-speed Ethernet access in each residence hall room and has wireless access in all academic buildings, the library, and the Reilly cafe. We recommend purchasing a high-end laptop to ensure that it lasts you for your four years at St. Bonaventure.

We recommend the following items:

• an Intel Core Duo processor of at least 2GHz;
• a 15" LCD;
• 4 GB RAM or main memory;
• 250 GB fixed disk;
• Microsoft Vista Business edition (alas, this costs more, but provides support for web site development). You can obtain Vista Business edition from us for free, but that makes you responsible for configuring your machine. We are unable to assist you with this;
• Microsoft Office 2007 Standard Edition or above. This edition does not include Access, which we use for the database course, but you can get it from us for free

The software required for classes, including development environments and compilers, are supplied in the lab. The development environment  used in CS1 and CS2, Eclipse, is open source and may be downloaded free of charge onto you personal machine. Eclipse is thoroughly integrated with Java, which is also open source and available without charge.

Bonaventure Computer Science is a member of the Microsoft Developers Academic Alliance, which enables students to obtain any Microsoft developer product free of charge. This includes Visual Studio, the database program Access, and all of the .Net Framework languages. It also includes Windows XP Professional and Vista.

We recommend that you connect your laptop computer to the Internet via the University's local area network using Ethernet card, which provides gigabit access to the Internet. Each residence hall room has one wired connection per person in the room. The University also has wireless access to the University's local area network in the library, all academic buildings, and the Reilly Center Cafe. Wired access is much faster and is useful for accessing the Internet from your room. Wireless access, on the other hand, provides access in places such as a classroom or the library without having to have a wire, enabling you to use your laptop pretty much anyplace on campus!

Students may receive academic credit for work conducted under the supervision of an Information Technology professional. Most internships are arranged by students through contacts they have at home. The requirement for an internship is that you work at least 400 hours under a software engineering or networking professional and that you complete a written and an oral summation of the experience. Most internships are done over the summer between the junior and senior year.

You bet! Most computer science majors work for technology services supporting one of five labs on campus. Others combine this work with web page authoring or other tasks for academic and administrative departments. Top students are hired as lower division lab assistants who assist faculty members in running lab sessions.

Nearly 100%. If you can get through us you will get a job. Demand for entry level IT professionals remains strong: our seniors generally begin looking in March of their senior year and have offers prior to graduation. MSNBC rates professional computer jobs such as software engineer, database administrator, network administrator among the best careers for 2008 and beyond. And our alumni working in industry are a major source of employment for our new graduates.

11. Does my computer need a modem?

No - wired and wireless access to Ethernet is available throughout the University. Further, Wi-Fi access to the Internet is available nearly everywhere, making a modem a thing of the past.

New York State has several excellent computer science programs, each having its own strengths. Area programs that we have relationships with include Colgate University, Hamilton College, Rochester Institute of Technology, SUNY at Geneseo, and Ithaca College. We hope you come here, but you won’t go wrong at any of these, either!

While the computer science program maintains its own labs with 24-hour access for majors, you want to bring your own laptop computer.  You are able to share data between the machine in your room and the lab departmental servers and download tons of expensive software from Microsoft for free (and legally!). We strongly recommend that you purchase your own machine.

No, the first course does not presuppose that you have done any programming. Approximately one-half of the students in Computer Science I have done some programming prior to the course, the other half have not. Students who have programmed in C++ or Java and are familiar with arrays and classes are encouraged to start with CS II.