wrt54g

I'm in my 4th year of 5 at a state university that isn't quite known for its CS program. The internet helped me to fall in love with programming- I always have a few projects going on the side, and I feel like I've taught myself more than I've learned in class.

But I'm always a little depressed to see that other students don't feel the same way. It seems like the vast majority of other CS/SE students are content to graduate not having hardly written a line of code in a language other than Java, and take some corporate IT job.

Nothing against Java or cubicles- it's just that there's so much cool stuff you can do with a computer, and few people here seem to care.

I could just continue keeping to myself and graduate, but I'd rather use some of my last 1.5 years here to get people to open their horizons, and get the few other people like me to leave their dorm rooms to encourage and inspire others.

I'm the president of the Computer Science Club, and meeting attendance is dismal, despite offering free pizza at every meeting, bombarding students with emails, posters, the usual.

Does anyone have any suggestions for how to get people to get excited, interested, and to build a culture like that of other universities and cities?