Where Does University Need to Focus for IT Students
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@jmoore said in Where Does University Need to Focus for IT Students:
I can see your point about the language but if that was the case then it did not last long. The fundamentals of the language are easily learned and after that it was just problem solving. Thats how my classes went. We would pick up enough language as we needed and then concentrated on problems. I was also doing calculus and physics at same time and those were harder than computer science.
Then you weren't getting real computer science
I've done all three, they are very similar. Real CS is hard stuff. Lots of schools slap CS labels on anything they can find, though, to save money. -
@scottalanmiller You dont think Baylor's cs program was real cs? We did problem solving with c++, algorithm analysis, data structures, assembler x86, operating system design, 3 levels of calculus, linear algebra, advanced calculus, ordinary differential equations, and partial differential equations. I did physics as second major but those dont really contribute to this discussion.
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@jmoore said in Where Does University Need to Focus for IT Students:
@scottalanmiller You dont think Baylor's cs program was real cs? We did problem solving with c++, algorithm analysis, data structures, assembler x86, operating system design, 3 levels of calculus, linear algebra, advanced calculus, ordinary differential equations, and partial differential equations. I did physics as second major but those dont really contribute to this discussion.
Not if it wasn't challenging
SUNY requires (or required in the 1990s) making virtualization as part of the freshman coursework for CS at the community college level. Real CS is HARD stuff. All that calc, diffy Q, C and so forth are required for non-software, non-CS workloads, too. CS would be all above and beyond that.
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OS design, DB design, that stuff is CS. But data structures, for example, is second semester freshman software engineering. It's good stuff to have, but it's not CS. It's foundational.
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@scottalanmiller I never said it was not challenging, you just have to be dedicated. I just felt that computational physics, astrophysics, plasmas, and solid state physics were harder for me. I dont feel that cs at the undergraduate level is above the higher level math and physics
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@jmoore said in Where Does University Need to Focus for IT Students:
I dont feel that cs at the undergraduate level is above the higher level math and physics
Not above, but should be on par.
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@scottalanmiller I would agree with it being on par. I know data structures is taken early however I was just giving examples of classes I could remember.
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@jmoore said in Where Does University Need to Focus for IT Students:
@storageninja I went to Baylor and thought they had a good program. It was mostly business with a bit of programming mixed in. I often "had" to help the girls figure out visual c++
I didn't say Baylor's CS was a bad program, just for working in IT infrastructure management, the MIS program was a bitter better rounded. If I wanted to do software engineering obviously MIS is a crap degree compared to CS. My personal issue with Baylor's CS program was that they had a lot of brilliant CS people, but beyond Bill Booth (Who had a master on the side in education) very few were good teachers. This isn't unique to Baylor and is a common issue in an engineering discipline at research universities where it is graduate students who do most of the actual education. Ultimately I wandered out of CS wasn't grades (made A's in my intro classes) it was because I watched office space, and visited a development office that seemed terribly similar and realized I didn't want to do that with my life.
I ended up with a really broad/rounded education (International Studies, minor business, Honors College (Baylor Interdisciplinary Core) that has served me well for my pursuits.
If I had my way, it would be impossible to graduate college without taking ancient and modern rhetoric. So many people in IT (and everywhere) make awful arguments.
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Soft skills are very important. The ability to present information to users, to management - so many people working in IT can't do that or do that very poorly. Classes in presentation skills, sales, marketing and so forth would be valuable.
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@scottalanmiller said in Where Does University Need to Focus for IT Students:
The biggest focus should be business and liberal arts. I want to see students with accounting, psychology, economics, general business, writing, public speaking and similar training. I can teach the tech that I need, I have to no matter what.
Time to drop my 2 cents, haha. I can say from current personal experience, my degree is more like this. Although since I am an online student I don't see how they would effectively do hands on tech anyways. It may also be the fact that I am pursuing IT management which focuses more on the business side of things. I luckily had a bunch of prior credits from a previous degree that covered most of that and the liberal arts, which is saving me a bunch of money, but that's besides the point. I always saw a degree/education as a way to get a general knowledge base and the specifics for the job/career are learned by doing them in personal time or on the job training and such.
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@biglittle said in Where Does University Need to Focus for IT Students:
Although since I am an online student I don't see how they would effectively do hands on tech anyways.
There is essentially nothing in IT that requires or benefits from physical hands. While real IT people in the field often do use their hands, it's to do non-IT tasks for a moment in between real IT tasks simply because there isn't enough scale to warrant a bench or electrical resource. For example, physically setting up a desktop, plugging in cables, racking a server or adding a graphics card to a desktop. IT might be called on to do those things, but none are IT tasks and absolutely none of that should be in an IT education.
Everything in IT, even networking stuff, can be done virtually. And all the big vendors provide virtual lab environments of their own for you to learn on. And building your own or having a university provide them is trivial and they need to do this for their in person labs, too. So really, for IT, even online classes can be 100% as hands on as in person ones. Moreso when you consider the lack of need for wasting time commuting or whatever, more time for hands on.
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@scottalanmiller said in Where Does University Need to Focus for IT Students:
We talk a lot about the problems with university education today, especially how it related to the IT field. But in a more constructive vein, now that we have identified an issue, how do we actually begin to solve this? What should university be doing and offering for IT students to increase its value in real, tangible ways?
I didn't read any of the replies yet, but my first thought on this is it depends on what you want to expect to get out of a university IT degree. I think it should be universal things that help you form a solid base across all IT aspects, that will help you with any real IT role (not bench).
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@scottalanmiller said in Where Does University Need to Focus for IT Students:
I think moving IT programs from CS/SE schools into being under a business school makes a lot of sense. IT is 80% business, 20% tech. Of course you need both, but universities are experts at teaching business and liberal arts, this is what they've done for hundreds and years and done well. Teaching tech is not in their traditional mandate and is something they have no historical track record for and little current capacity. Not only is the non-tech stuff dramatically more important, it's where universities have the most skill. Teaching too much tech makes universities almost certainly set up to fail while teaching something that isn't even very useful.
This was where my thoughts were leading as well, and what would have helped me the most.
I've self-educated myself (through labs/books/videos/work-experience) with all the tech (MCSEs, Linux certs, Vendor Tech, etc). I can do without that in college, and I think it is best to do it yourself anyways. As Scott said in another post somewhere, it shows dedication and real self-interest.
The real value is learning what to use, how to apply it to a business, and where it makes the most sense to use it... you know, business stuff.
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@travisdh1 said in Where Does University Need to Focus for IT Students:
@scottalanmiller said in Where Does University Need to Focus for IT Students:
I think moving IT programs from CS/SE schools into being under a business school makes a lot of sense. IT is 80% business, 20% tech. Of course you need both, but universities are experts at teaching business and liberal arts, this is what they've done for hundreds and years and done well. Teaching tech is not in their traditional mandate and is something they have no historical track record for and little current capacity. Not only is the non-tech stuff dramatically more important, it's where universities have the most skill. Teaching too much tech makes universities almost certainly set up to fail while teaching something that isn't even very useful.
I completely agree. The business side of my education is what is really valuable today, while any tech things they taught me back then are so far out of date it's a bad joke.
Yup, 97.2% of the stuff I learned in tech school, I don't even use today.
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As others have mentioned, more IT-based math would be very beneficial. You can't go wrong there. Math is used everywhere, even if you're not dealing with numbers, the logic is needed.
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@tim_g said in Where Does University Need to Focus for IT Students:
As others have mentioned, more IT-based math would be very beneficial. You can't go wrong there. Math is used everywhere, even if you're not dealing with numbers, the logic is needed.
I specifically use algebra, calc and stats in every day IT (and other) life.
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@tim_g said in Where Does University Need to Focus for IT Students:
The real value is learning what to use, how to apply it to a business, and where it makes the most sense to use it... you know, business stuff.
Stuff you can easily learn outside of college too, but stuff that college is well positioned and experienced to teach. They've been teaching that stuff for a very long time and know how it works.
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@tim_g said in Where Does University Need to Focus for IT Students:
@travisdh1 said in Where Does University Need to Focus for IT Students:
@scottalanmiller said in Where Does University Need to Focus for IT Students:
I think moving IT programs from CS/SE schools into being under a business school makes a lot of sense. IT is 80% business, 20% tech. Of course you need both, but universities are experts at teaching business and liberal arts, this is what they've done for hundreds and years and done well. Teaching tech is not in their traditional mandate and is something they have no historical track record for and little current capacity. Not only is the non-tech stuff dramatically more important, it's where universities have the most skill. Teaching too much tech makes universities almost certainly set up to fail while teaching something that isn't even very useful.
I completely agree. The business side of my education is what is really valuable today, while any tech things they taught me back then are so far out of date it's a bad joke.
Yup, 97.2% of the stuff I learned in tech school, I don't even use today.
That's how I feel every time.
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@scottalanmiller I get what your trying to say but at the same time I think your so far removed from this type of thing that you are not considering everything. I disagree that some of that physical stuff you mentioned is not IT. The reason being is that both level of my IT management are not very good at that and make poor business decisions in buying equipment because they also are so far removed from anything hands on they don't know how it works anymore. It may be fundamental yes but when its knowledge is critical for making IT decisions with vendors I think you also have to consider that IT too. For example, we continually spend massive amounts of money(at least for us) on keeping the latest and greatest processors in machines in our heavy users laptops and computers. They will not even consider using an SSD even though it is cheaper and users store everything on a netweork share anyway. If the SSd failed it is 25 min or less to reload their image and 5 min to walk there and map their network share again. Thats how I am told to do it. SSd would be a great speed increase over our 5400 and 7200 drives we have used for the past several years.
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@jmoore said in Where Does University Need to Focus for IT Students:
The reason being is that both level of my IT management are not very good at that and make poor business decisions in buying equipment because they also are so far removed from anything hands on they don't know how it works anymore.
I think you are confusing my intention. When I say it is "not IT", I mean - it is simply not an IT function. In no way do I mean to imply that it is "below" IT. It's not fundamental or not-fundamental, it's simply "not an IT function." All kinds of things are not IT, it doesn't make them good or bad, just different job roles.
That there is poor decision making here is bad management, plain and simple. Having more technical knowledge does not improve business decision processes, that's a totally different thing. This is where univerisites should shine, in teaching better thinking and approaches to problem solving. Sadly, in the real world, it's where they tend to fail pretty hard often encouraging the worst thinking and decision making.
