UCSD CSE Summer Series

Hi all!

If you’re getting this email, I think you’re an incoming UCSD CSE transfer student this fall. Welcome!

👋🏻 CSE Summer Series

My name is Joe, I’m a professor in the CSE department. I teach a bunch of different courses in the department, we’re likely to run into another at some point.

As part of CSE Summer Series, a free online summer program run by the department, I’ll be reaching out with weekly emails until fall quarter starts, providing a bunch of different resources:

• A Discord chat server for saying hi and asking me (and each other) questions
• A weekly activity (usually programming) for reviewing content useful for the upcoming year
• Videos, readings, and websites related to (and in some cases straight from) our courses
• Reminders about summer events and opportunities

A note on life and academics in 2026: you’re arriving as a CS student in a world where AI assistants will happily write your code for you. I use AI assistants every day: they are amazing tools, and also a real crutch that can hamper learning. So most weeks I’ll give you two small things—one to do with AI turned off, and one to do with AI turned on—for us to discuss.

✅ Do Now! (Do one, some, or all!)

• Watch two videos:
  • The welcome video, which walks through Leetcode’s interface (this is actually a video I made last summer: the accidental bugs I wrote are just so good I’m repeating it)
  • A quick demo of the “find your PATH” exercise below

• Fill out the welcome form so I know who’s out there.

• Join the Discord server and say hi.

🔌 AI off – Programming Practice. At UCSD you’ll be in courses that test your programming and code-writing abilities on-computer or on-paper, in person, with no AI or other tools to assist. That’s an important skill! So for these coding problems, try them yourself first. This week, make a free LeetCode account and do your best on Length of Last Word in a language of your choice:

https://leetcode.com/problems/length-of-last-word/

Then share your solution by replying to this email or DMing me on Discord. I’ll post some of the different approaches I see next week. (Can’t make a LeetCode account? Email me.)

🤖 AI on – Agents ↔ Your Environment. Two small things:

1. Apply for the GitHub Student Developer Pack — it’s free for enrolled students and includes lots of useful tools. Approval takes a few days, so start it now. If your UCSD status doesn’t verify, reply and let me know.

2. Open any AI chat you have (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot’s free tier — any of them).

   • Tell it what computer you’re on (operating system matters most: Mac, Windows, etc),
   • Ask it “Give me a single command to print all my environment variables, explain the command and why it’s safe to run, and explain what PATH is.”
   • Then open a terminal (you can ask the agent if you want help figuring out how!) and run the command.

   Reply to me or share on Discord the line with your PATH variable, plus one thing the assistant told you that turned out to be wrong or that you couldn’t verify. That will let us chat about “paths” and how different computers are configured (which is something that’s directly relevant in CSE29).

   ⚠️ One real-world habit while you’re here: environment variables sometimes hold password-like information (sometimes called “access tokens” or “API keys”). Read the full list on your own screen, but don’t paste the whole thing into Discord or email! When you reply, just share your PATH line (that one’s safe, and fun to compare across Mac/Windows).

   If you want to explore more on your own, ask the agent to explain the other environment variables for you and what they are used for. Reply or DM on Discord if you get stuck with any of this, or with anything else you learn!

The point of #2 isn’t just that we learn about terminals and paths. It’s the whole workflow: you can use an assistant to go from a term you might hear but be fuzzy on (“environment variables”), to a concrete proposal of things you might try, to running and checking whether it did what you wanted, to further exploration. Also a note on safety: I (Joe) know that checking environment variables can’t hurt your computer. In general asking AI “give me a command and say why it’s safe” is not really enough justification to trust running its output! We’ll talk about that more in future weeks.

🔗 Links and Resources

• CSE courses and enrollment: https://cse.ucsd.edu/undergraduate/tentative-course-offerings
• CSE advising: https://cse.ucsd.edu/undergraduate/undergraduate-advising
• Dive Into Systems — the textbook used in CSE29, one of your likely first courses, with lots of C resources.
• The website https://cse-summer-series.github.io/2026/ has all of these messages.
• I’ll generally pay attention to email replies to this, and to DMs/messages on the Discord server during the summer, so reach out if you have questions, or even just want to say hi!

Looking forward to a good summer with you all!

Joe