Professor Haden Lee has been an amazing addition to the Department of Computer Science. In his first semester, he taught a graduate-level Algorithms course and he has now transitioned to teaching a graduate-level Data Processing in the Cloud course. We sat down with him to discuss how his first semester went, how his second semester is going and touched on his future goals.

“I learned a lot of new things in terms of how students organize”

Before Professor Lee joined USF, he noted that his goal was to learn and contribute to the student body as a whole. This first semester was a learning experience for him, especially during CS Night, our yearly student project showcase. Professor Lee spent the night exploring projects and thinking about how he could possibly be a faculty sponsor for a project in the future. He enjoyed all of the excitement and projects that students have come up with that displayed their own strengths as programmers and creativity.

Professor Lee was not only a spectator but an active participant of CS Night. He was part of a panel that shared career insights with students after the student showcase and answered questions from the audience about how to get an internship along with post-graduation advice for Computer Science Majors.

Something that Professor Lee would like to see in the future in the department is to modernize the Computer Science Labs space and equipment for classes and projects. His Data Processing course is very programming heavy and is broken down into two sections. The first is running programs on your local machine, with the course transitioning to the cloud with Google Cloud Platform. Professor Lee says that it would be nice to be able to use the CS labs so you could run computationally intense programs in the Computer Lab which would reduce latency from testing to verifying your project output.

“Giving students relevant advice is important to me”

Professor Lee also gives students the option to have 1-on-1 time with him to talk about anything that they would like. He says that 80% of students take him up on the offer and a common thread is about their resume. Professor Lee stresses the importance of getting help from people with relevant industry experience because, in a fast-moving field like software engineering, it is important to stay current and up to date. He looks forward to finding a solution to help other students in a scalable way.