I'm a computer scientist, not your tech support

You know those really awkward introductions you sometimes have on campus? The ones where you meet someone new, a friend of a friend maybe, and you need to make conversation without any common ground?

You don't know the person at all (let's call her Georgina), don't know what her interests are and you have no idea what she does with her time. Maybe I'm more socially awkward than the rest of you (OK, I definitely am), but for me, these introductions usually go like this:

Georgina: Hi, I'm Georgina!

Me: Hello, I'm Avi. Nice to meet you.

I might, if I'm feeling particularly social, shake Georgina's hand. I don't usually feel that way, so it probably won't happen. After the introduction, we might exchange unpleasantries about classes and how much work we have. I might even make a sarcastic comment or caustic joke. Regardless of the conversation, however, the following question inevitably pops up.

Georgina: So what's your major?

Me: I'm a computer science major. What's yours?

Georgina: Oh my God! You can fix my email!

It's usually email. Sometimes it's Microsoft Office. Once in a while it's something more random like people having spilled rum all over their keyboards. No matter what Georgina or anyone else wants me to fix, my feelings are the same. No! I don't want to fix your computer. I probably don't even know how. My computer is broken now too. I sent the thing to Apple.

The Office of Information Technology (OIT) pays some moderately knowledgeable students to sit in a room all day — 24 hours a day, most days a week, in fact — and answer your computer questions. That's their job.

If your email doesn't work, call the help desk (8-HELP). If you can't figure out how to write Greek, Russian, Hebrew or Slovenian in Microsoft Word, call the help desk. If your USB drive won't load, then (sing it with me!), call the help desk.

If you're just too lazy to pick up the phone, you can also try emailing your Residential Computing Consultant. The RCCs are paid to fix your email, help you print things and get rid of those thousands of viruses and spyware programs you accidentally downloaded.

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There are a couple of RCCs in each residential college and a few more for the upperclassmen. There are even three RCCs for graduate students. You can find out who they are and where they live at www.princeton.edu/rcc. You might be surprised to find that I am not on that list. That's not a mistake — I'm not your RCC.

Now if you have a real problem with your computer, OIT pays some really knowledgeable people (not students) to sit in a room all day and help you. The OIT Solutions Center is on the 100-level of Frist Campus Center. Contrary to popular opinion, the Solutions Center is not a dungeon in which scary nerd demons live. Actually, it's a place where nice computer technicians work to help you get your computer working again. And, no, I don't work there either.

Sometimes, if I am feeling particularly prone to flights of fancy, I imagine what might happen if Georgina cared enough to keep up the conversation. Maybe she'd ask what kind of computer science major doesn't know how to fix her computer. After all, isn't that what computer science is all about?

Well, I just spent a week scraping the course catalog for interesting classes to take next semester. While I still have no idea what I'm going to take, I did learn something from all my effort. There is actually no COS class called "Fixing Microsoft Windows and Related Problems." There's not even a class called "Fixing People's Email." Shocking, I know.

Why doesn't the computer science department offer classes like those I just mentioned? Because products and tools like Microsoft Windows, email and web browsers are results of computer science research, not central issues in the field. So what is computer science? It's not the easiest thing to pin down, but I'll take a shot. Computer science is the discipline of figuring out what we can make a computer do for us and how we can make a computer do it fast.

So who cares if computers can do new tricks? Don't they already do plenty of stuff plenty fast? They really don't. Every year our computers get faster and our hard drives get larger. Along with that expansion, people want to solve bigger scientific problems, take bigger pictures, store music and video at higher quality, and play more awesome video games. Every one of those advances takes serious computer science research.

There was a time when math was considered the lingua franca of the sciences. To quote computer science professor Bernard Chazelle, "science now has two Esperantos, math and computer science." Computer science is a major enabler of the most exciting science research going on today. Computers allow biologists, physicists and chemists to collect more data than they might ever analyze on their own. Computer science gives them the tools they need to let the computer help in the analysis.

Computer science is about fixing your computer, but only peripherally. Asking a computer science major to fix your computer is like asking a premed to prescribe you medicine or asking a history major what he did last night. They might know the answer, but it might also be a pretty bad idea. So if you ever meet me on campus please, please, keep that in mind. And take a computer science class. They're damn good.