You probably have a picture in your head of what a computer scientist looks like. Hoodied tapping quickly on a keyboard. Alone in a dark room lit by the glow of computer screens. Fluent in a language you don't speak.
Stephanie Allen wants to replace that picture.
Allen is a senior instructor at Portland State University, and she has built something unique inside Portland State’s Computer Science department: a cohort where belonging is treated as seriously as syntax. The same thirty students move through three introductory CS courses together across an entire academic year, with peer mentors who came back because the experience was worth returning to, and an instructor who notices when you're slipping before you do.
The continuity is important, but "the main difference is the community," Allen says. That sounds simple. It isn't. Allen handles recruitment herself, tracks each student's trajectory across three courses, and takes struggling students to lunch. She books guest speakers from the Portland Trail Blazers' data science team, brought in after a student expressed an interest in the NBA, and from Airbnb, where speakers share not only what they do professionally but how their own sense of identity as computing people evolved over time and where they found their place in the field. She does this because she knows that a ten-week term is too short to form the relationships that keep someone from quietly disappearing, and because she knows that students leave CS not because they can't do it but because they stop believing they belong in it.
Students show what they know in different ways. They sit down one-on-one with a peer mentor for a “learning check”: a conversation, not an exam, carrying no grade penalty. The mentors have taken these same courses. They remember what was hard. A student who would freeze on a timed exam will explain their thinking to someone who struggled with the same concept a year earlier.
But keeping students together and assessing them differently doesn't automatically make them a community. Allen changed what happens inside the room, too. She opens class with art. Students look at a painting together and with encouragement describe what they see out loud as a group, building on each other's observations, changing their minds, refining their ideas. No wrong answers.
Then Allen moves to code, and the students who just practiced saying I see something, I'm not sure what it is yet carry that habit into a domain where most beginners stay silent rather than risk being wrong. Allen has run the comparison: sections that view art first produce students who talk about code differently.
She is not looking only for students who already love programming, though they are welcome, too. She wants art majors. Education majors. Biology students. Anyone who has looked at a problem their community faces and wondered whether technology could help. "Companies don't need that type of person anymore, who's just so skillful at creating code that they can sit in a room all by themselves and just generate code," she says. "We have AI now for that. What we need are creative problem solvers and innovators with diverse perspectives, who can work together."
The solitary coder, in her view, is precisely the role automation will replace. "Even if AI is generating the code," she says, "we still need humans to come up with creative solutions and look at problems in different nuanced ways, and to verify that the software matters and is ethical and correct." The human-in-the-loop, the collaborator, the question-asker, the person who walks in carrying a problem from somewhere else entirely, that person becomes more essential, not less.
That belonging piece is harder to quantify and more important than any metric.
One of Allen's Discover CS peer mentors is graduating from the Honors College this year, and wrote her honors thesis on women and belonging in spaces. The student noticed early in her time in the department that the carpet outside the CS men's bathroom was visibly worn down, while the women's side was not. That floor was telling a story about who had been present in that building and who hadn't. Other women in the department told Allen they were self-conscious about dressing too femininely when entering CS spaces, as though appearing as their full selves would mark them as outsiders. Allen recalled that one of her students who loved computer science, who thrived in the cohort, who intended to major in it, left after reaching upper-division courses. She was put off by the “bro" culture of those classes.
The gender problem is real and specific. But it sits inside a larger pattern Allen sees across the cohort: students reading the environment for evidence that they don't fit, and finding it. The student who is older than everyone in the room finds it. The student who doesn't have a laptop that matches everyone else's finds it. The student whose English is their third language finds it. The cohort interrupts that scanning, so that you stop searching for signals of not fitting in and start recognizing faces.
This past year all seven of her peer mentors were women from the program. Their visible presence in the department's glass-walled study area changed the atmosphere of the space for other women who walked into it. Representation, in Allen's model, is not symbolic. It is environmental.
If you have ever talked yourself out of computer science because you didn't recognize yourself in it, or because you thought creativity lived somewhere else, Allen's cohort is worth a conversation. She has added language to her course website specifically for students who don't yet meet the math prerequisite, because she would rather talk to you than lose you to an assumption.
On the first day of the cohort, Allen asks her students to draw a computer scientist. She asks them again on the last day. The drawings change. The hooded gamer dude typing on a computer alone in the dark more closely resembles the person holding the pencil.
That's what it looks like when an assumption dissolves. And that's where belonging starts: not when someone welcomes you in, but when you stop believing you were never supposed to be there.