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Computer Science

Searles Science Building Directory

Alumni and Careers

Bowdoin’s curricular offerings in computer science prepare graduates well for further study or professional careers in teaching, industry, and financial services.

Recent computer science majors have entered graduate programs at the following institutions:

  • Brown
  • Carnegie Mellon
  • Dartmouth
  • Georgia Tech
  • Indiana
  • Michigan
  • Northwestern
  • Penn
  • Princeton
  • Stanford
  • Tufts
  • UCLA
  • Utah
  • Washington

Computer science graduates have taken positions at firms such as:

  • Google
  • Amazon
  • Twitter
  • American Management Systems
  • Chase Manhattan
  • Goldman Sachs
  • ITA Software
  • Meditech
  • Coopers and Lybrand
  • Liberty Mutual
  • Sun Microsystems

Alumni/ae have also followed career paths in Peace Corps, medicine, law, neuroscience, physics, and music composition.

The Department maintains an active alumni network, providing guidance and advice to current students as they navigate their time at Bowdoin and beyond.

Bolor-Erdene Jagdagdorj headshot

Bolor-Erdene Jagdagdorj

Class of: 2019

Location: Seattle, Washington.

Major(s): Chemistry, Computer Science

Minor(s): Asian Studies

“The deeper I studied computer science, the more fascinated I became by its intersection with medicine, ethics, and technology.”

What have you been up to since graduating from Bowdoin?

After graduating from Bowdoin, I began working at Allstate as a security software engineer. Partway through my time there, I started a master’s program in security and privacy at Carnegie Mellon University. At Carnegie Mellon, I had the chance to explore my interdisciplinary interests, from developing machine learning models for autonomous heart surgery in medical robotics to interning at the Collaboratory Against Hate, where we used natural language processing techniques to analyze hate speech both online and offline.

My master’s thesis focused on abortion data privacy and brought together my interests in technology, ethics, and medicine. After completing my graduate studies, I joined Microsoft’s AI Red Team, where we work to ensure the safety and security of AI systems. On the team, I develop open-source software to help automate red-teaming practices and to contribute to research and operations that identify potential harms in AI models and applications.

I am deeply passionate about responsible AI practices, especially where they intersect with medicine and mental health. I have organized workshops, contributed to research papers, and presented at conferences focused on these critical topics.

Why computer science?

Up until I attended Carnegie Mellon, I was confident I wanted to become a doctor and spent my four years at Bowdoin pursuing opportunities and internships related to that goal. Fortunately, I had Professor Laura Toma as my first-year advisor, and she encouraged me to explore my growing interests in computer science.

The more I studied computer science, the more fascinated I became by its connection to medicine, ethics, and technology. From Bowdoin to Carnegie Mellon and now to Microsoft, I have continued to explore how technology can be developed responsibly and used to make a positive impact.

Are there any classes, professors, or experiences that had a lasting impact on you?

There were so many incredible professors and classes at Bowdoin, but Professor Toma made a particularly lasting impact, from advising me on courses to mentoring and leading our Bowdoin Women in Computer Science group. I still remember a day when I was ready to drop my CS major to focus on my more lab-intensive chemistry major. She reassured me that it was possible and even “easy” to fit both majors into my schedule. While the workload was not exactly easy, it was absolutely worth it. Thank you, Professor Toma!

Within the CS department, one of my favorite courses was Intro to Systems. When I first walked into the class, I had no idea what to expect, and maybe that made it more exciting. I had never encountered low-level programming or learned how computers actually work. That class completely changed how I thought about computing.

What advice would you give to current students or recent graduates interested in your field?

Embrace the liberal arts experience; it is incredibly valuable. Bowdoin helped me develop interdisciplinary thinking, which is pivotal in my current role and useful in any career path you choose. There is so much freedom to explore interests at Bowdoin. For example, my freshman seminar on global media and politics inspired me to take enough related courses to minor in East Asian studies, which allowed me to study the history and culture of the region where I was born. Those small, discussion-based seminars are such a unique part of Bowdoin, and I miss them very much.

Also, take your professors out to lunch in the dining halls. It is a great way to get to know them better, share ideas, and enjoy Bowdoin’s amazing food. Finally, embrace everything Bowdoin has to offer. It truly is such a unique and wonderful four years.

Will Walden headshot

Will Walden

Class of: 2017

Location: Baltimore, Maryland

Major(s): Computer Science

“I learned that you can, in fact, just put in the work and get better and then one day realize that science is maybe not an apt description for what you’ve been up to and that perhaps this then makes you a scientist.”

What have you been up to since graduating from Bowdoin?

Just after graduating in 2017, I worked at Okta in San Francisco for two years with around ten other Bowdoin alums. I gained a lot of valuable engineering experience while I was there, but I still felt drawn to pursue a PhD in AI, especially after really enjoying my summers at Bowdoin doing research in that field. I applied to graduate programs and ended up at the University of Rochester, starting in fall 2019, where I worked broadly in natural language understanding (NLU).

On one hand, the PhD was a challenging experience. Doctoral work is often solitary, and the pandemic made mine feel even more so. On top of that, Jade Willey ’17—my partner whom I met at Bowdoin—broke up with me shortly after I started the program. A year and a half later, though, I convinced her to reconsider, and she came to Rochester for her internal medicine residency. She eventually married me. So, despite its difficulties, my time in Rochester was ultimately a very positive experience.

I now work as a research scientist at Johns Hopkins, where I’m fortunate to collaborate with amazing faculty and PhD students on a range of AI problems—from multimodal and multilingual retrieval-augmented generation, to AI for scientific discovery, to my increasing focus on AI safety.

Why computer science?

I had no exposure to computer science in high school and decided to take the introductory class at Bowdoin in the spring of my first year with Steve Majercik (now professor emeritus). Not only was Steve incredibly enthusiastic as a teacher, but that class was the only one that semester where I routinely lost track of time doing the assignments simply because I was having so much fun.

Throughout high school—and even for much of college—I thought of myself as more humanities inclined. One of the greatest gifts the CS program at Bowdoin gave me was the confidence to pursue a career in STEM even though mathematical and computational thinking never felt natural to me.

What advice would you give to current students or recent graduates interested in your field?

I expect the rapid advances in AI we’ve seen over the past few years will soon bring about a hugely unstable and dangerous period in our history. I’m genuinely terrified by the risks associated with this shift—from the democratization of bioweapons engineering, to extreme concentrations of power and wealth, to the possibility of catastrophic loss of control. Many leading experts in the field share these concerns, and I wish more people took them seriously. We are not prepared for these risks.

Most students probably already know that coding assistants are often better programmers than they are, and those tools will continue improving. It’s a strange moment to be a CS major, and it raises an important question: what does this moment demand of you?

I would encourage every Bowdoin student—and certainly every CS major—to think about how you might use your career to help ensure that this transition goes well. This might mean considering a broader range of career paths than you would normally think about. It could involve doing technical AI safety research, gaining experience in governance and policy to support improved regulatory frameworks, or working in advocacy and public awareness to help people understand these risks. The career-guidance organization 80,000 Hours is a great place to explore these possibilities. I am also always happy to talk with students who are interested in any of these topics.

Grace Handler headshot

Grace Handler

Class of: 2017

Location: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Major(s): Computer Science

“The computer science department at Bowdoin is the best of the best, partially because of what it is at its core and the community it fosters in Searles Hall and partially because it exists in conversation with the rest of campus.”

What have you been up to since graduating from Bowdoin?

My college internships and first full-time job after graduating from Bowdoin were in software engineering, including a data architecture internship at Goldman Sachs that I later transitioned into full-time. I quickly moved into a product management role on a start-up within Goldman Sachs called Marquee, and since then, I’ve continued in product management in the advertising technology industry, currently at The Trade Desk, where I’ve been for the last six years. These positions have taken me from New York City, to Denver, and back to Pittsburgh, where I grew up and now work remotely.

I always describe product management as the ultimate liberal arts graduate career, because the role is rooted in one’s ability to ask questions, to seek out problems, and to facilitate solutions across groups of people with different incentives. Having a technical background can certainly help you be a good product manager, but great product managers are much more difficult to quantify against a hard skill. I jokingly say I have a bachelor of the arts in computer science, and that combination of technical knowledge and liberal arts thinking has proven to be the most valuable foundation in my career.

Why computer science?

In high school, I participated in a FIRST robotics team at Carnegie Mellon University. Since my middle and high schools offered no technology-related classes, this was my first real introduction to coding and engineering. During my first year at Bowdoin, I enrolled in Intro to Computer Science and got hands-on experience with programming for the first time. The ability to turn an idea into something tangible so quickly and freely was both exciting and fun, so I decided to continue pursuing it.

Are there any classes, professors, or experiences that had a lasting impact on you?

Somewhat misaligned with my departure from coding after college, my favorite class at Bowdoin was Intro to Systems. So much of software is hard to grasp—how does this actually work? This class brought what we were doing all the way back to the machine, which made me think about programming and building in a much larger way.

What advice would you give to current students or recent graduates interested in your field?

Liberal arts thinking is only becoming more valuable. Hard skills have always been, and will continue to be, increasingly automated. They are useful within a certain timeframe. However, the ability to think across disciplines and to learn new things will remain a timeless skill.

Tom Hazel headshot

Tom Hazel

Class of: 2005

Location: New York City, New York

Major(s): Computer Science

“There are great opportunities to match your computer science skill with an interesting career and industry.”

What have you been up to since graduating from Bowdoin?

Since graduating from Bowdoin, I’ve lived in Boston and Cambridge, where I worked at Waters, a chemical testing company, and at Everyscape, a small start-up. I then moved to Salt Lake City with my three Bowdoin roommates to ski for a season. After that, I moved to New York City with my wife, Emma Leonard ’05, and started working at Google.

Why computer science?

I didn’t come to Bowdoin specifically to study computer science; I was generally drawn to math and science. During my first year, I really enjoyed Professor Sehon’s Logic class in the philosophy department and Introduction to Computer Science taught by Professor Majercik. I found myself always doing my computer science assignments and projects first, and that’s how I ended up pursuing the major.

Are there any classes, professors, or experiences that had a lasting impact on you?

The absolute best class I took at Bowdoin was Algorithms with Professor Toma. It opened my mind to new ways of thinking and approaching problems. I also really enjoyed the RoboCup class that Professor Chown taught; it was project-based and allowed students to develop both technical and organizational skills. I see a lot of overlap between that class and my current role as an engineering manager. Finally, Professor Sehon’s Logic class was a fantastic introduction to rigorous, structured thinking.

What advice would you give to current students or recent graduates interested in your field?

One of the interesting things about computer science is that it’s used in almost every field—it’s not just limited to big tech. There’s fascinating CS work happening in pharmaceuticals, industrial engineering, art, finance, and government.

Jonathan Todd headshot

Jonathan Todd

Class of: 2005

Location: Boulder, Colorado

Major(s): Computer Science

“Leverage your liberal arts background to go beyond problem-solving and connect with the people whose problems you’re addressing.”

What have you been up to since graduating from Bowdoin?

For the first few years after Bowdoin, I worked as a software engineer at a couple of early-stage start-ups, including one I had founded before graduating. Those years taught me a tremendous amount about wearing many hats, working long hours, and making plenty of mistakes while moving from idea to viable product. I loved the autonomy, ownership, and fast pace of start-up life, but after a few failures, I was determined that my next role would be with founders who had already been successful and were willing to mentor. In 2010, I answered a Craigslist posting for a tiny start-up called Okta. Its founders were sales and engineering leaders who had helped build Salesforce, and it presented another outstanding opportunity for learning and growth.

At Okta, I spent my first four years focused on building customer-facing products such as single sign-on, multifactor authentication, and directory services. At the time, businesses were rapidly adopting cloud applications, but there was no easy way to manage access. Incumbents like Microsoft and Oracle had strong solutions for desktop applications but were slow to adapt to the cloud. That gave us a narrow window to out-execute them. It was an exhilarating challenge. As Okta gained traction with thousands of companies and hundreds of millions of users, new scaling and reliability challenges emerged. I spent several years helping bring the product to global scale and high reliability. The countless midnight pager alerts were surprisingly good training for parenthood! Okta went public in 2017. From then until 2024, my focus shifted back toward creating new products, both by starting teams in-house and by searching for or integrating acquisitions. Since leaving Okta, I have been working as a start-up advisor and investor, coaching running and track, and being the primary parent to my two young kids.

Why computer science?

I had an early fascination with computers, starting in high school, when I wrote code and built websites first for myself, then for schools and local businesses. At Bowdoin, my interest evolved from figuring out how to get computers to do something—applications—to understanding why they work the way they do—algorithms and architecture. That continual process of asking and answering “why” questions, encouraged by Bowdoin, built the foundation I have relied on throughout my career.

Are there any classes, professors, or experiences that had a lasting impact on you?

Algorithms with Professor Laura Toma was both the hardest and most impactful class I took. It was foundational academically and professionally, especially since companies at the time emphasized algorithms in interviews. Later in my career, as systems scaled, those first-principles skills were invaluable for identifying bottlenecks and designing better solutions. AI & Robotics with Professor Eric Chown was the best preparation I had for real-world coding and collaboration. At the time, both the Pioneer and Aibo Dog robots were brand-new, and nobody had real expertise with them. I pursued a couple of independent studies to get them running experiments and usable by others. The open-endedness, the need to integrate code from others, and the hands-on problem-solving all mirrored real-world engineering. Forming competitive RoboCup teams gave me my first experience with large-scale collaborative coding.

What advice would you give to current students or recent graduates interested in your field?

Stay curious about fundamentals and know that this pursuit never ends. Too often, I have seen engineers build “new” solutions without first asking where the problem has already been solved and what prior creations might teach them. Novel applications almost always rest on old foundations. Engineers are often handed tasks with little context, but the best results come from being curious, talking to the various personas using your software, understanding the domain deeply, and studying how others have approached similar challenges. Even in an age where AI can generate code, that code still serves a human purpose. The subtleties of human problems require your critical thinking skills.

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