 By the time that students have reached CS3, they've already invested a significant amount of time, energy, resources in their CS education. For those students who come into CS3 and halfway through want to declare the major, what happens that those who want to do that end up not doing that? One of the concepts used for retention is the idea of a pipeline which quickly progresses students from an initial interest in STEM all the way through to a career. And this STEM pipeline exists also at the more college level. And so for us, the pipeline exists primarily with CS1, CS2, and CS3. And CS3 is the point at which students can actually go on to declare a CS-related major. We have a lot of retention studies that are done at the CS1 and CS2 levels. How do we get people into computer science and how do we encourage them early on? The problem is that once they reach CS3, we have less studies. What starts to impact students at that specific level? What leads to them leaving the major even though they want to be there? And so our study looked at that to see if we could figure out what was going on there so that we can better support those students in the future. So a few factors earlier on in the pipeline that lead to a student not being retained include things like gender or prior exposure to the material. And we found that those weren't as relevant at the CS3 level. We found consistently cropping up in our data that it seemed to be important whether a student had taken CS2 recently and whether they were taking this CS3 course early in their college career. Looking at this data, we termed a fast-track student to be someone who took at most a one semester break between CS2 and CS3 and who took CS3 within their first two years at college. We brought together material from two separate kind of data sources. One was archival course data where we could see students' performance on assignments and also their responses to a mid-semester check-in. And then the other set of data that we looked at was the university student records, which included all of the student declarations post CS3. We put those two together so that we could take a look at, A, for the students who intend to declare during CS3, where do they actually end up going? Do they end up declaring? And then B, so that we could see for the students who do declare and those who don't declare, how do they perform on the same course material? Interestingly enough, we were looking at a specific population, fast-track students. And for those, we found that fast-track students, on average, have a higher end-semester grade than non-fast-track students. And also we found that fast-track students have a higher performance during the course of a project across all four projects when compared to non-fast-track students. One of the potential implications of our study is taking a look at how we support students who are maybe nontraditional or who are coming to CS3 later in their college careers. And that specifically looks at the types of programs that are meant to specifically support these students. And our findings suggest that potentially it might be important to make sure that those students stay fast-tracked for this major that they're interested in. So they should be encouraged to take CS2 and CS3 relatively back-to-back and that they should also try to take those courses earlier in their college careers. I'm really hopeful that our research will open up more research into this specific student demographic, the fast-tracked versus the non-fast-tracked students, and maybe even looks into which of those feel more supported during the course of their CS education and what specific challenges those two demographics might face. I'm also hopeful that some of the interventions that we find in the future for non-fast-tracked students can also be used to support traditionally underrepresented students in CS.