This semester, Clemson IE students were given a unique opportunity to attend a series of computer programming workshops sponsored by the student chapter of INFORMS. Learning modern programming languages can give IE students a clear advantage over their peers, while also enriching their academic skills.
Berkay Gulcan, president of Clemson’s student chapter of INFORMS stressed the importance of this workshop to all students:
“Knowing a programming language will open up the doors to very broad opportunities. Nowadays, knowing a programming language will be an advantage over your competitors, in your career and may even be mandatory for some careers.”
Murwan Siddig prepared the workshop and served as the lecturer. The workshop focused on Julia, a programming language that the organizers thought would most benefit the students in IE. Berkay explains:
“We choose Julia as the programming language because Julia is a flexible, powerful, open-source language that is also very easy to learn. As a student organization representing operations research and management science, after introducing the basics of Julia, we focused on how this programming language can be used for mathematical programming (formulating and solving problems using math).”
Berkay reported that the workshops themselves had a steady attendance of both graduates and undergraduate students. They even welcomed students from other academic departments.
Overall, the workshop was a success, “We had very positive feedback, which showed students were thinking about learning a programming language, and this workshop series was a successful start.”
The student chapter of INFORMS would like to thank everyone who attended the workshop, the IE department for their support, and especially Murwan Siddig for all his hard work. They will continue offering educational workshops in future semesters.
