Student Experiences
During Summer term of 2020, as part of an ongoing research project within the Computer Science Department at Portland State University, a team of students interviewed their peers and asked them to share their experiences.
Have you ever taken a class where you were the only person of your race or gender present?
It can feel isolating. Adding that to all the other stresses of being a college student can make it quite a
challenge.
For this project,
we were curious about the intersection of diversity and student retention. We conducted interviews with
students regarding their
experiences in the Computer Science program at Portland State University.
What you see here are some excerpts from our student experience interviews. We hope that
this will shed some light on what the department is like from some students’ perspectives.
Each link below will lead you to a page with more exerpts in that category.
“I just didn't feel like I belonged... I step into a room and – I mean I still have the confidence to
just… suppress those feelings – but it's hard to ignore when I walk into a room and I'm the only person that
looks like me.”
--CS student of color
“...the consensus with students is that the lower division courses are the
weeder
classes, and that’s obviously discouraging to hear when you’re first starting, is that that’s the
kind of
mentality that the school takes on... It [would be a] much better environment to have your
professors rooting for you
to get through, not hoping that students will fall off because they’re not smart enough... [but]
an
environment where [they hope] students succeed.”
-- CS Student
“ How can you be successful when you are doing the technical portion of the midterm or final and someone
is breathing over you. And you make a mistake and you can hear their pen writing down your mistake. So it's
like super nerve racking. And if you have anxiety, you go into a block. It’s like, "2+2" you put
that in
a calculator because your mind is going into overdrive."
-- Former CS Student of Color
" The professor [...] was always very intimidating. [They] never seemed like the person
that you want to
go ask for help. Like [they] had very specific rules about the type of questions we could ask and like the
type of knowledge we had to have in order to go ask [them] some questions and how [they weren’t] going to
explain some things.
[They] would just exclaim in class that ‘you should know this!’ ‘I don’t want to receive questions
like
this.’”
-- Former CS Student
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