Forget the dot-bomb; Bill Gates wants students to know that computer science is alive and well.

Prior to his campus address, Gates (upper right) met with President Jeffrey Lehman (left), Dean Kent Fuchs (right), and a small group of faculty members in Duffield Hall’s Young Colloquium Room. Although construction work continues on the Duffield project, the meeting room was opened temporarily for this event.

Bill Gates has a cool new watch. He showed it off when he visited Cornell in February. It’s a black digital one that might look out of place on the wrist of the richest man in the world, until he puts it through its paces: It can pluck sports scores and stock quotes and weather reports from the ether, hold your calendar, send instant messages, do all sorts of nifty things.

That kind of connectivity is part of his big vision. What’s not so clear to him, though, is whether there will be enough computer scientists and engineers to make his vision come alive. So Gates, Microsoft Corp.’s chairman and chief software architect, went barnstorming in February, visiting five college campuses including Cornell’s to implore students to consider software careers.

“I think we need to do more to get the word out about the opportunities and the range of things that go on,” said Gates, speaking to a crowd of 1,000 Cornell students and faculty members who gathered at Call Auditorium in Kennedy Hall.

Many of these people were already sold on that notion: they began lining up to hear Gates more than an hour before he took the stage. But others aren’t convinced, and are turning away from computer science careers. In 2000, 24,000 students declared computer-science majors. By 2002, that number fell to 23,033, according to the Computing Research Association, a group of academics and other researchers.

The number has fallen at Cornell also, said W. Kent Fuchs, the Joseph Silbert Dean of Engineering.

Fuchs, who met Gates with President Jeffrey Lehman and others before the speech, said Gates came across as “a thoughtful and articulate spokesman for computer ­science and engineering.”

“We shared with him innovative changes that are taking place at Cornell in new majors for undergraduates that we believe will attract new students to the discipline,” Fuchs said.

One of those new majors is known as Information Science Systems Technology, which will be available to students in the College of Engineering beginning Fall 2004. It is aimed at students who are interested in applications of information technology, for example, learning how to harness huge data sets to analyze financial markets or the way pharmaceuticals interact with the human genome.

The cross-pollination between different disciplines in both research and education is something that Gates encountered particularly at Cornell. His three-day tour also took him to Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Illinois.

“With my dialogue with the faculty this afternoon, the emphasis on these multi-disciplinary approaches and the excitement around that was very impressive to me, because I think that’s going to be critical and allow for all the sciences to benefit from these tools,” Gates said.

He downplayed fears that the students who would take these jobs will find themselves displaced by foreign workers. “I think for the U.S., I’d label it as more of an opportunity than anything else. We need to strive to keep our edge, which is by doing research,” he said.

Gates has long been familiar with Cornell. Mike Nash ’85 CS is in charge of Microsoft’s security efforts. Steve Sinofsky ’87 runs the company’s Office software project.

It was Sinofsky, in fact, who gets credit for focusing Microsoft on the Internet in the first place. On a visit to Ithaca in the mid-1990s, Sinofsky’s flight home was delayed. He decided to spend some time wandering campus and found students sending e-mail and checking course schedules online. The e-mail Sinofsky sent back to Microsoft headquarters: “Cornell is WIRED.” Gates credits Sinofsky’s account for causing him to finally take the Internet seriously.

Now he’s exhorting those who would be his future acolytes with the message that there’s still some world-changing left to be done and software is the place to do it. “Computer science, I’m saying very explicitly, is the most fun and interesting field,” he said.

—Ken Aaron