ARCHIVE: IT CAREER EXPERT
Is your College offering the right kinds of courses?
John Smiley
08.31.2000
Rating: -4.18- (out of 5)
Is your College offering the right kinds of courses?
Recently I received an email from an IT recruiter that was pretty
troubling. In it, he decried the lack of real programming experience
that college graduates with degrees in Computer Science or related
disciplines possess.
About the same time, I was speaking to a friend of mine whose daughter
was about to graduate from a well regarded university with a degree in
Computer Science, and who had just returned from a trip to visit the
Dean of Computer Science at his daughter's university.
During the visit, my friend had expressed strong concern that the
Computer Science curriculum at his daughter's university was not
adequately preparing her, and other graduates, for the 'real world'. In
fact, my friend, who happens to be the Vice President of IT for his
company, told the dean that he would have a hard time hiring his own
daughter for an entry level position at his company. Why?
First, while his daughter could probably build a microprocessor from
scratch, and program in languages such as Fortran, C and C++, the
university she attended was slow in developing courses covering the
latest and greatest in programming languages and development tools. For
instance, Visual Basic, ASP and Java were recent additions to the
curriculum, and hard to believe, they were only electives. Incredibly,
his daughter hadn't taken courses in any of these hot technologies.
Secondly, due to scheduling requirements at the university, she had
completed the Computer Science requirements for her degree in the first
two and half years of her college career. As a result, her last
programming class had been 18 months prior to graduation, and she had
spent the last year and a half of her college career fulfilling general
education requirements and electives, not honing her skills with
computer related courses. In other words, her IT skills were pretty
stale.
What was the Dean's reaction? She apologized for the university's slow
introduction of new technologies into the curriculum and promised to do
better in the future. And she promised to look into the scheduling
logjam in the Department that would encourage students to complete
their Computer Science requirements so early before graduation.
In summary, if you or someone you know is pursuing a computer related
degree at a college or university--do some investigative work to ensure
the college is quick to react to new technologies, and 'time' your
pursuit of these courses as close as possible to graduation.
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Written by John Smiley, MCP, MCSD and MCT, author, and adjunct
professor of Computer Science at Penn State University in Abington,
Philadelphia University, and Holy Family College. John has been
teaching computer programming for nearly 20 years.
John Smiley is president of Smiley and Associates,
http://www.johnsmiley.com/smass/smass.htm a computer consulting firm
located in New Jersey.
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