SEAS Professors Partner with Tech Giants to Enhance Computer Science Courses
HARVARD— Professors at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) are increasingly partnering with major tech companies to enhance computer science education. Collaborations with companies like Meta, Amazon, OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft provide technical support, resources, and opportunities for students.
Last September, over 250 Harvard students participated in the Computer Science 50 Puzzle Day, sponsored by Meta. Winners received over $1,000 worth of Meta merchandise, underscoring the company’s long-standing support for the program. Meta has sponsored the event for nearly 15 years.
Jim H. Waldo, the Chief Technology Officer at SEAS, stated that the school has “a number of contracts” with Amazon. He explained that SEAS has been using Amazon Web Services (AWS) for over a decade. The partnership helps provide the computing power necessary for courses like Computer Science 109A: Introduction to Data Science. Professors contact the department’s computing staff, who then coordinate with Amazon to secure credits for students to use the cloud computing platform.
Computer science concentrator Justin Liu ’27 highlighted the benefits of such partnerships. “I think it’s nice that students have the opportunity to work on ambitious projects that require a lot of compute power, without having to worry about where to find those compute credits from,” Liu said.
Waldo also pointed out that the partnerships increase Amazon’s visibility on campus. “From Amazon’s point of view, I think the main thing that they get out of this is students being used to Amazon and when they need in the future large amounts of computing, they’ll turn to Amazon as a framework that they understand and know how to use,” he said.
Beyond Amazon, other tech companies are also involved. “COMPSCI 1060: Software Engineering with Generative AI” offered free Codeium credits to students this spring. Students in “AC 215: Advanced Practical Data Science” had access to Google’s computer platform.
CS50, the introductory computer science class, has the most extensive corporate sponsorship network. Partners include Meta, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, GitHub, and Visual Studio Code.
Julia J. Poulson ’26, a former CS50 student, found these partnerships helpful. She noted that the use of VS Code made the class accessible. “They had their own graders that were easy to access and in VS Code. Lots of commands that they had programmed that made it easy to check your work, and that kind of abstracted away a lot of the complex language,” Poulson said.
Professor David J. Malan ’99, who moved CS50 to the cloud in 2008, cited in a research paper that the move, while financially supported by Amazon, faced technical difficulties. Despite these initial challenges, “the upsides proved worth it.” He told The Crimson that all sponsorships “have been initiated on our end,” often reaching out to alumni or industry contacts to improve the student and teaching fellow experience.
Professor Christopher A. Thorpe ’97-’98, who teaches CS 1060, spoke favorably of the partnership with Codeium, an AI-powered coding assistant. Thorpe noted the sponsorship was at no cost to Harvard or its students. Akshat Agarwal from Codeium stated that the company aims to “make the technology as accessible as possible.” Lucas Chu ’23-’25, a teaching fellow for CS 1060, helped facilitate the partnership. “This presented a valuable opportunity for our students,” Chu said.
Thorpe summarized the benefits of these collaborations, stating that it is a “win-win-win for the corporate sponsor, the university, and above all, the students.”
