Harvard Computer Science Courses Partner with Tech Leaders
Harvard University’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) is increasingly partnering with major technology companies to enhance its computer science curriculum, providing students with resources and opportunities that might otherwise be unavailable.
Last September, over 250 Harvard students participated in the Computer Science 50 Puzzle Day, which is sponsored by Meta. The winning teams received Meta merchandise, showcasing one of the many corporate collaborations supporting SEAS courses. Amazon, OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft are also among the companies that work with Harvard faculty.
Jim H. Waldo, the Chief Technology Officer at SEAS, noted that the school has “a number of contracts” with Amazon. These collaborations frequently involve technical support. For example, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has been utilized for many years, stemming from the need for significant computational power in courses like Computer Science 109A: Introduction to Data Science.
Waldo explained that professors in need of AWS contact the department’s computing staff, who manages the distribution of credits. These credits are provided by Amazon and allow projects far larger in scale. Justin Liu ’27, a computer science concentrator, appreciated the advantage.
“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 highlighted the benefits for Amazon. Having students familiar with their services means they are more likely to rely on those services later when needing large amounts of computing power.
Other tech companies have a presence in Harvard classrooms, including Codeium, which offered free credits to students in the “COMPSCI 1060: Software Engineering with Generative AI” course.
CS50 remains the most prominent course with corporate sponsorships. It lists Meta, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, GitHub, and Visual Studio Code as partners. Julia J. Poulson ’26, a former CS50 student, praised these collaborations.
“I actually think they used it in a very good way that made the class really accessible to people,” Poulson said, referring to VS Code, “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,” she added.
David J. Malan ’99, the instructor for CS50, moved the course onto the cloud in 2008 with support from AWS. Malan wrote that while there were initial hurdles, the benefits were great. He noted that all corporate sponsorships “have been initiated on our end.” He typically reaches out to alumni or industry figures to find the latest technology useful to students.
Professor Christopher A. Thorpe ’97-’98, who teaches CS 1060, also spoke favorably of the partnership with Codeium.
“Although it’s not a formal partnership, Codeium generously sponsored their Pro plan for our students and course staff for six months,” Thorpe wrote in a statement. “This was at no cost to Harvard or our students.”
Akshat Agarwal from Codeium confirmed the company’s goal is “to make the technology as accessible as possible.”
Lucas Chu ’23-’25, who helped facilitate the partnership, stated it offered their students valuable opportunities.
Thorpe added that the corporate sponsorships created a “win-win-win” scenario for the corporate sponsor, the university, and most importantly, students.
