Innovative Align master’s program celebrates ten years of transitioning students to tech

The Align master’s program began in 2013 with a dream of helping computing newcomers transition into tech. Now, as Khoury College celebrates Align’s tenth birthday, the program’s architects reflect on how it was built. Pictured left to right: Catherine Gill, Ian Gorton, Brian Lackaye, and Carla Brodley. Not pictured honoree: Larry Finkelstein. Photo by Josephine Pettigrew.

If the Align program was a good idea from the jump, it certainly wasn’t an obvious one.

Generally speaking, both computer science and master’s programs are notorious for their rigor. So to combine the two into a program for students who had never studied computer science at the university level? There was no guarantee of success.

But ten years after the program welcomed its first learners, it hasn’t just succeeded; it’s soared and scaled, segueing cohort after cohort of curious students to tech. And as Khoury College turned its eyes toward Seattle for the latest stop of what Dean Elizabeth Mynatt called “our 40th anniversary tour,” those eyes also turned to Align, which counts Seattle as its birthplace.

As part of the proceedings, five 40 for 40 honorees — Carla Brodley, Larry Finkelstein, Catherine Gill, Bryan Lackaye, and Ian Gorton — were lauded for their pivotal roles in the origin and development of the program, which has since expanded to Northeastern network campuses across the country.

“What is so exciting about Align is the scale and how built-for-purpose it is,” says Gill, executive director of Northeastern’s Center for Inclusive Computing. “We’re not shoehorning you into anything. This program was designed for you.”

Putting down roots

In its infancy, Align was not limited to computing. It originated as one of several professional master’s programs for students with a wide array of backgrounds, wherein a set of shared prerequisites could lead to a degree from one of a handful of Northeastern colleges.

“Khoury College’s master’s in computer science was discipline-specific enough that it didn’t really meld with anything else,” explains Lackaye, who currently works in Northeastern’s Office of Global Network and Strategic Initiatives, and who previously wore a variety of admissions, advising, oversight, and logistics hats over 14 years at Khoury College.

Khoury College boasted the university’s largest master’s program at the time, and the college’s hires and national reputation, Finkelstein notes, were on the upswing. So driven in good part by Philomena Mantella, then the CEO of Northeastern’s global network, the new initiative spun off into a Khoury-only program and began to search for a home.

“We had a lot of students doing co-ops in Seattle, and I thought it would be a good opportunity to build research collaborations,” explains Finkelstein, the college’s dean from 1994 to 2014, who also noted the local presence of Microsoft, Amazon, and Google. “There’s so much high tech in Seattle and a shortage of personnel, so it was a natural fit for students who wanted those jobs.”

Besides opportunities for students, the city’s up-and-coming tech scene also provided tons of highly capable, innovative faculty candidates.

“People who were working across the street — people who students wanted to learn from — could bring their expertise into the classrooms,” Lackaye adds. “Seattle was a thriving and growing city 10 years ago, a precursor to what it is now: a place that almost feels like you’re landing in the future.”

But despite the large potential personnel pool, Finkelstein notes, it still took a wide-ranging effort to find faculty who liked to work during the day and teach in the evenings, and to build curricula to support them.

“To get these faculty to teach the courses we wanted to offer out here, it took a lot of collaboration with the faculty in Boston,” Finkelstein remembers. “Developing graduate curricula from scratch is a lot of work, and it helped to have faculty who could help with that.”

By the time the first 11 Align students arrived in Seattle in 2013, the program had started to approximate its current form. But big changes were still ahead.

Support, success, scaling

“The original idea was that students could switch between STEM areas with just a one-semester bridge,” says Brodley, who took over the dean’s position from Finkelstein and held it through 2021. “But to increase not just diversity of demographics, but also diversity of thought, we wanted to take people from every undergraduate major.”

The philosophical shift meant the bridge would be widened to two semesters to ensure students could adjust. Soon afterwards, esteemed Williams College professor Andrea Danyluk oversaw another bridge restructure, aiming to replicate the foundation of the undergraduate CS curriculum so that students could then delve into upper-level master’s concepts. In time, this progress fostered an expectation of what it took to cross the bridge.

“You’re turning a history major into a computer scientist in two semesters; why wouldn’t it be hard?” Gill says. “In the beginning, we’d tell students, ‘We’ve got you, you’ve got this, come on in.’ And we had to refine that to, ‘It’s a lot. You’re going to have to work hard. We think you can do it; here are all the supports.’”

And those supports, both inside and outside the classroom, proved critical.

“Master’s programs tend not to be invested in from a resource perspective the way undergraduate and doctoral programs are,” Lackaye explains. “Much to Larry and Carla’s credit, they realized we needed overinvestments compared to what master’s programs traditionally get. That way we could not only create a space for it to evolve, but we could work with students individually out of the gate to make sure as many as possible got through.”

Financial support came from the National Science Foundation, from philanthropists including Pivotal Ventures, and from companies including Meta, Google, Wayfair, Charles River, Dell, and numerous others — about $10 million in total. Gill drove much of the fundraising, and it was that effort, Brodley says, that allowed Khoury College to make the first semester nearly free for Align’s pioneering cohorts, and “let students try the program in a way that wouldn’t damage their long-term financial health.”

READ: Daron Green, who helped arrange Meta funding for Align, earns 40 for 40 honor

As the fundraising continued to bear fruit, a team led by Brodley, Lackaye, Gill, Danyluk, and Gorton (the Seattle campus’s director of computing programs) worked to channel that investment into resources. The college added multiple dedicated recruiters for Align, a rarity in an academic world where each recruiter typically works across an array of programs. It created co-curricular supports to foster a welcoming environment and retain students, including an identity series of speakers who had come to computer science in unusual ways. It doubled down on its advisor ranks. And it got a major assist from the existing infrastructure in Seattle.

“I don’t know that the concept would have worked if the campus personnel — the dean, the associate dean, the student services folks, the events and operations folks — hadn’t bought into the program too,” Lackaye says. “We invested in college- and program-based infrastructure, but campus leadership went out of their way to create an environment that greatly contributed to making sure students got through and felt supported.”

The funds also helped beget enrollment, and once Khoury leadership saw Align graduates landing positions at top tech firms — to rave reviews from the hirers — that enrollment begat expansion.

“In the beginning, there was a bit of resistance to bringing the program to Boston after we’d proved it worked in Seattle. Some faculty thought it might be ‘dumbing down’ computer science,” Brodley remembers. “But over time, the faculty became really excited about teaching, say, an AI class where their students had studied psychology, neuroscience, sports management. The conversations were so different than they were with CS-only backgrounds. They grew to love having this diversity of thought in their classrooms.”

Around the time the program made the jump to Boston in 2016, it also changed its name — sort of. What began as ALIGN, an acronym for Accelerated Learning Into the Global Network, became Align, a double entendre based on the students aligning their undergraduate backgrounds with computing, as well as the program’s goal of aligning the demographics of the tech world to the demographics of the country.

The university-wide scaling came rapidly after that. Silicon Valley in 2017. San Francisco in 2019. Vancouver and Portland, Maine in 2020. Arlington, Virginia this spring. Oakland and Miami this coming fall. The student ranks have similarly swelled, going from about 250 in the fall of 2017 to well over 1,800 now. Those students hail from more than 150 different undergraduate majors, most of which aren’t STEM-related. Many of the roughly 1,000 program alumni who preceded them have gone on to positions at top tech companies, with Google and Amazon leading the way. Align, one of the first programs of its kind, had developed an unmatched scale and reach.

“It’s a psychological and intellectual lift, and we had to make that case to folks,” Lackaye said of the program’s expansion. “Once we had a diverse set of students in the classroom it became easier to recruit a broader array of people because we had proof. We could say, ‘This program is working for people just like you; come join us.’”

The ripple effect

Like many fields with sizable gender gaps, gender inequality in computer science begins at the foundational level of education and filters upwards.

“Experience in computing is unevenly distributed at the primary school level. Girls are less likely to take CS classes or do coding camps in the summer; they’re consistently about 20 percent of those participating,” Gill notes. “So when you get to university, why would that 20 percent magically become some other number? What you need are ways for people to discover computing at the postsecondary level.”

That’s exactly what the Align program has become — a bridge program that embraces diverse people and perspectives to do its part in closing that gap. Despite women comprising just 27 percent of the American computing workforce and 20 percent of the computing undergraduate degree earners, in Align, they’re a majority — 54 percent.

“Carla took the concept of Align and started to push her team to think about it as an access play for women and people from populations historically underrepresented in tech,” Lackaye says.

This ethos was baked in from the start, and the “overinvestment” in recruiting and marketing allowed the team to make good on its diversity aims. By the program’s second year, more than 40 percent of its students were female — twice the proportion of women in the college’s direct-entry master’s program. Brodley credits Northeastern and Khoury College’s existing academic and diversity reputations, while Gill cites the program’s additive quality, which helps students to realize that their undergraduate degree isn’t the whole story.

“By creating new pathways and allowing people to come in when they’re ready to add CS, we’ve seen more than 50 percent women take us up on that invitation,” Gill says. “In 2019, when I saw three consecutive intakes of more than 50 percent women, when I saw we matched the gender demographics of the country, that was a really big deal.”

Now ten years in, the program’s reputation continues to grow. Brodley says that some current faculty members applied to teach at Northeastern in the first place out of affinity for Align and its mission. She’s also heard from leadership at top co-op employers that Aligners’ diversity of thought has been a welcome addition.

“It’s an extremely attractive option for a lot of companies,” she says. “The world is increasingly interdisciplinary and this is a natural way to get someone who thinks in two disciplines.”

And as Northeastern exports its master’s education and diversity principles through the Center for Inclusive Computing and the MS Pathways to Computing Consortium, the Align program, ground zero for the success of those principles, keeps humming along.

“Align is ‘You’re entering a field that traditionally looks like this, but we’re using this program to change that,’” Lackaye says. “That dialogue started 10 years ago and is still going on today.”

For a sampling of stories about Align students, check out:

• Bioengineering to data science: How LeAnn Mendoza found her way to Align
• Small humans, big dreams: How Align’s parents juggle kids and computer science
• Align students Molly Beck and Shital Waters win “Women Who Empower” Awards

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