Adelbert Chang

I came to UCSB in 2010 as a Computer Science major in the College of Engineering. In my first Fall quarter I learned about the CCS CS program and a year later I joined the program. CCS gave me the freedom I needed to take the classes and pursue the research I wanted, and I firmly believe it was one of the best choices I made at UCSB. The small classes allowed me to connect with professors more and the accelereated curriculum had me taking graduate courses early on, many of which ended up being my favorite courses. It also allowed me to do hands-on research for course credit, which gave me the freedom to do research continuously through my undergraduate career (I worked at the SAND Lab doing graph analysis and modeling). To this day I believe that without CCS and SAND Lab I would not be where I am today.

Nowadays I work on tooling and infrastucture for the data science and optimization team at Target. Outside of that I like to study functional programming, participate in open source (Typelevel, GitHub), and give talks.

Computer Science aside, I believe among the most valuable things you can do is surround yourself with a diverse group of people who are truly passionate about what they do. CCS is a rare place that gives you exactly this environment by design. If you are the type of student that is very self-driven, motivated, and aren’t afraid to go against the grain, join CCS—you won’t regret it.