The Department of Computer Science and Engineering offers students a solidly defined, well-taught curriculum that achieves an effective balance between theory and application.

Computer Science and Engineering students can:

• Learn the essentials of the discipline, and keep up with its whirlwind changes, in classes taught by professors.
• Complete research internships at Lehigh, at other universities and with top information-technology companies;
• Collaborate with professors on cutting-edge research projects, especially in the areas of computer graphics, multimedia, database systems, and data mining.
     

Virtual environments, wearable computers and multimedia are just a few of the research projects undergraduate students have tackled in the CSE department.

In one NSF-funded project, students are helping design CSE courses that incorporate multimedia.   Besides classes and labs in artificial intelligence, logic- and object-oriented programming, algorithm design and database management, the department requires a two-credit senior projects course. Beyond this, most students choose to take part in outside internships and cooperative education experiences, many of which are arranged by professors.

The department's faculty and graduate students conduct cutting-edge research in a variety of key fields and encourage students to take an active role in the rapid growth of its graduate program. 

CSE faculty maintain nationally funded research programs in three broad thrust areas: Computer systems engineering, including computer arithmetics, computer architecture and DSP systems; Intelligent software systems engineering, including networking and network caching, software architecture and computer vision; Information systems engineering, including distributed data indexing, databases and virtual environments.

CSE graduate students start their own research projects upon enrolling in the graduate program.  They typically work in teams, interacting closely with their professors, with other CSE research groups, and with researchers in other Lehigh departments .