Colloquium: Existential Crisis! Is my degree worthless?

Join us March 3  for our next invited speaker of the semester! Davis Vaughan will be presenting at 11 AM in the Z. Smith Reynolds (ZSR) Auditorium, Room 404. 
Davis’s talk is entitled “Existential Crisis! Is my degree worthless?” 

Abstract: With the rapid advancement of AI tooling, things can feel a little bleak for students looking to join the workforce. Will AI take all of the jobs? Will I even enjoy the work that I’m doing? Is my degree worthless!?

In this talk, software engineer Davis Vaughan will walk through a number of concrete examples of how he and his colleagues at Posit use Claude Code and other AI tools to amplify their own skills, rather than replace them. He hopes that getting a glimpse into how these tools are used on a day-to-day basis can ease a bit of that existential dread you might be feeling, instead leaving you excited about how they can be used to improve the quality of code, not just the quantity of it.

Davis is a software engineer at Posit working on Positron, Posit’s new data science focused IDE, and the set of R packages that make up the tidyverse, including dplyr, tidyr, furrr, and vctrs. He is also the co-creator of Air, a popular R code formatter.