Friday the Graduate Student Association kicked off over a month of free computer training sessions that officials say will help graduate students with their research by providing programming skills.
The training sessions cover four different computer programming applications - Matlab, C, C++ and Visual Basic - and take place on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays in 139 Hochstetter Hall. The classes are open to any interested student, whether graduate or undergraduate.
According to GSA President Xun Liu, GSA's decision to offer training comes at a time when an increasing number of the graduate students at UB have to use applications such as Matlab, C, C++ or Visual Basic for their research.
"We found that lots of grad students, not just computer science majors, need to use Matlab, C, C++ and VB to write programs for their research, but they are not proficient at those," said Liu.
As for the programs for which GSA decided to offer tutoring, the choice was a careful one, said Liu.
"We are aware that Computing and Information Technology offers Microsoft and HTML lessons, so we don't want to duplicate them," he said.
Liu said GSA tutors will only be able to do so much in the time they have, so the training will serve mostly to answer specific questions and help people with difficulties they experience using the applications.
"Our program is something more like workshops, not courses," said Liu, stressing that this tutoring is not as formal or as thorough as an actual class. "First, there is no credit; second, you also realize that there's no way to teach somebody the language from scratch in just eight to 10 hours, so it's more about special topics that help people solve questions."
The Hochstetter classroom has a capacity of 26 students. So far, 19 students have registered for Matlab training, 7 for C training, 9 for C++ training and 11 for Visual Basic training.
According to Liu, GSA will continue to offer computer tutoring in the future.
"We will offer the program in the spring too, and will try to do it even better, with the feedbacks from students," said Liu. "I really hope that this will be running continuously in the future years."
According to Yang Cao, GSA member who coordinated the computer training, the sessions are offered at varying times during the week based on availability of facilities and tutors.
Junior computer science major Brian Mattucci said he has considered taking advantage of GSA's free service.
"Let's just say that I would take free course in C because I work on my own projects outside of school. I do have a book on C, so I will teach myself eventually, but a free training course would be more helpful to me."
