Changing Times

An old friend from college sent me an e-mail, and it got me thinking.  When I was an undergraduate at Harvard some significant number of years ago, I took the graduate level algorithms course offered by Michael Rabin and the graduate level complexity course by Les Valiant.  There were maybe a half dozen people in each of the classes.  (They were great classes, of course. But CS at Harvard back then was really, really small.) 

This semester, I'm teaching the graduate level course on randomized algorithms and probabilistic analysis.  Right now, the enrollment is 74 students;  well more than half are undergraduates.  Somehow, that says something to me -- about how the field has grown, and in at least some regards how Harvard has changed.  And about how much more prepared students are these days for these kinds of classes.  (Knowledge or probability is much more prevalent.)  Class sizes have been creeping up for so long that while it's noticeable year-to-year, it's much more stark and remarkable when I think back to my own time in college. 

Of course, it's also on my mind because it's a pain teaching a graduate class that large.  But it's a pain I can live with -- if I didn't like teaching, I wouldn't have become a professor.  And it's gratifying, if not a little bit shocking, that there's this kind of interest in the subject I really love, that I've been excited by for decades.