Code_Wes, the University’s coding club, serves a crucial purpose in supplementing academics with a strong learning community. Founded during the COVID-19 pandemic, the group has invited speakers, planned social events, and sent students to conferences in the area. The Argus sat down with perpetual Exley Science Center resident and Code_Wes administrator Nishant Aggarwal ’26 to discuss the low faculty-to-student ratio in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, how to study niche topics like quantum computing when they aren’t available in the classroom, and future possibilities for coders to collaborate with other groups on campus.

The Argus: What does Code_Wes do?

Nishant Aggarwal: Code_Wes hosts a bunch of different events over the year. It’s basically a platform for people to learn more about computer science. We host informational sessions about topics that may or may not be taught by the department, as we do have a lack of electives. A lot of skills in demand in this field aren’t being taught in the elective classes to computer science students, so the information sessions would help with this.

We attended a robotics conference at Yale [University] recently, which was very enlightening in terms of the broad range of research topics explored there. We also funded students for the Shasha Ethics and AI seminar last year. This semester, we funded the students who did the Yale Hackathon, which was a great experience for them. We had some of these students—who are now pursuing their master’s at Stanford [University]—give talks about their experience of applying and being accepted into these programs. Sometimes we also call in experts from Google and other relevant companies to talk about their research because Wesleyan is a small liberal arts school. Companies like Google don’t officially visit our campus, so we have to rely on connections to get speakers from this field.

A: How did you get involved and what was your motivation for joining?

NA: My freshman year, I met the president of Code_Wes at the student clubs and associations fair and joined the club. We only had a couple of meetings throughout the year because the team was busy seeking out internships, so organization was difficult. It started out in COVID, when there was a lack of community for coders.

A: How well-connected is the club to other college coding clubs in the area?

NA: Unfortunately, we are not very well-connected to other colleges in the area, because I’m uncertain how willing the other clubs would be for collaboration. Most of the time when there’s a partnership, it’s symbiotic, and Wesleyan itself doesn’t offer any particular draws. So, a tech partnership might not be very fruitful for them, and also there aren’t a lot of colleges nearby. There’s Yale and UConn up north, but they’re bigger schools, and Wesleyan being a smaller school definitely plays into how collaborations would be difficult for tech.

A: Why is your club a necessary space for coders?

NA: Wesleyan is a very good liberal arts school—that’s what it is. Unfortunately, the cost of keeping that reputation is that the University sometimes allocates [few] resources to the Math[ematics] and Computer Science departments here. This year, there were approximately 16 new major declarations, and we have a north of a hundred majors here. That puts computer science [CS] in the top five to ten majors here, but we only have seven to eight professors. Comparing that to the other departments here with the same number of majors, there’s a huge difference in the student-to-faculty ratio. This inevitably leads to bigger class sizes, and when you do [pre-registration], this hurts a lot of people. There’s only so many seats, and so there’s difficulty getting into the classes one might want. Finally, because there’s only so many professors and students, the faculty is always teaching the core courses, and so we rarely have any electives being taught. That’s a bummer because people don’t learn a lot of up-and-coming topics like AI and quantum computing, which puts them at a disadvantage when applying for internships or jobs.

A: Which professors usually oversee the club? How is the faculty involved?

NA: We have two faculty advisors for the club, [Assistant Professor of Computer Science Sebastian] Zimmeck and [Assistant Professor of Computer Science] Sonia Roberts. They help us out a lot—I mentioned earlier the Yale robotics conference, which was partly sponsored by Professor Roberts. She informed us about it and helped with the bookings, transportation, and contacts. Professor Zimmeck helped us get in contact with Google to get experts from there on campus because he has done research for them in the past. And now we’re looking forward to a computer science formal taking place in two weeks, which they’re helping us get funding for. We also just got the sign-off from them for purchasing deodorant to present as a prop at the formal, which we think is really funny.

A: How is the situation for Code_Wes similar or dissimilar to other STEM clubs at Wesleyan?

NA: I do think that Code_Wes shares problems with similar clubs on campus by way of being a relatively new STEM club in a liberal arts school. But what’s really unique about the problem that Code_Wes tries to address, is how the University covers [up] the low student-to-faculty ratio for computer science. They essentially combined the Math and Computer Science Departments together, so technically we have 30 professors, but only 8 of them are for computer science. This hurts us a lot, and it’s not being done to any other major. This is definitely an issue I think should be talked about more.

A: Can you talk about personal interests and the inability to pursue these at Wes? Is this is a problem prevalent for a lot of CS majors looking to go into research?

NA: Yes, I’m taking a tutorial in quantum computing, and we’ve been going through a lot of stuff, but no one’s really expertly knowledgeable about it because it’s such a newly emergent field. I’m working with Professor Zimmeck, and we work on privacy regarding how different ad companies track you, and how one can legally request to not be tracked. So, related to that, we want to help Code_Wes members get into research, but the shortage of professors means they can only take so many at one time, so there’s a bottleneck there. We have one big lab, so to speak—Professor Zimmeck’s lab has 15 to 20 people. Other than that, labs are pretty small. We have a few people in a robotics lab that’s newly opened, with Professor Sonia Roberts. Professor [of Computer Science Norman] Danner [has] a small lab, but that’s about it.

A: Are a lot of CS majors involved in the club? Or do they know about it?

NA: I do think a lot of CS majors know about it. We have over 120 members, if I’m right. That speaks to the volume of the club. A lot of the events are sponsored through the major mailing list to the department.

A: What’s something that you wish more people knew about your club?

NA: One thing I want to emphasize is that the club is not just for computer science [majors]. It’s open for anyone who wants to code. If you have a passion project—maybe you want to build an app, or a website, or a game—we want people to learn these skills collaboratively and go somewhere with these ideas. It’s not at all a hierarchical club. We want everyone to have equal footing and create an engaged community for people on campus. 

A: What’s the long-term goal for Code_Wes?

NA: The long-term goal is to keep building a community by integrating more people and making it more interdisciplinary and a little less coding-centric. This is so that anyone can take part, especially other clubs. For example, if Green Fund or WesEntrepreneurs are in need of coding skills for a project, we’d love to collaborate and help different communities achieve their aims through technology. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Janhavi Munde can be reached at jmunde@wesleyan.edu.