When Alisa Castillo ’25, a middle child from California with parents of Salvadorean and Nicaraguan descent, started taking computer science courses in her first year at Cornell, she already felt she had a lot to catch up on.

“I got to know people who came here with a lot of experience under their belt,” she said. “Some already worked on their own personal projects before coming and had years of experience knowing XYZ languages.”

To better catch up with some of her classmates, she applied for CSMore, a program run by the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science to help prepare people from underrepresented minority groups so they join the computer science field.

Castillo had taken engineering classes in high school, but once at Cornell, she jumped around between potential majors. “Doing CSMore solidified that I wanted CS to be part of my curriculum and made me want to learn more about the subject,” Castillo said.

Now in its third year, CSMore has grown from a three-week online class held during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic to a rigorous, one-month, in-person program that prepares students for three of the traditional sophomore courses — complete with faculty research talks, a full slate of social activities, and networking opportunities with major companies.

Read the entire story on the Cornell Bowers CIS website.