Where Does University Need to Focus for IT Students
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For a program in IT I am going to have to say business, calculus, and a bit of programming for algorithm analysis and problem solving.
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@jmoore said in Where Does University Need to Focus for IT Students:
@scottalanmiller Yeah it has been out a really long time. Probably not real useful for IT directly but it helps with problem solving which is more important in my opinion.
Python and R are the languages of problem solving.
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@scottalanmiller I have no real experience in R but python works and is popular these days. Baylor did c and c++ mostly when I was there and those helped my problem solving a lot I felt along with all the calculus I took. I also am of the opinion that those lower level languages help with problem solving better than higher level languages like python. I like python but I just dont feel like it would have helped me as much as c++ in that regard.
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@jmoore said in Where Does University Need to Focus for IT Students:
@scottalanmiller I have no real experience in R but python works and is popular these days. Baylor did c and c++ mostly when I was there and those helped my problem solving a lot I felt along with all the calculus I took. I also am of the opinion that those lower level languages help with problem solving better than higher level languages like python. I like python but I just dont feel like it would have helped me as much as c++ in that regard.
I'd say the opposite, the reason being that when working with C or C++ you are spending your time dealing with the language and not with problem solving. Your time is spent on the infrastructure of coding itself. With high level languages like Python, you have far more time and fewer distractions so that you can focus on actual problem solving.
It's a lot like how people recommend using a Raspberry Pi to learn Linux. All it really does is make them spend their time learning the Raspberry Pi and they forget what they were actually there to learn in the first place.
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@scottalanmiller said in Where Does University Need to Focus for IT Students:
@jmoore said in Where Does University Need to Focus for IT Students:
@scottalanmiller I have no real experience in R but python works and is popular these days.
It's a lot like how people recommend using a Raspberry Pi to learn Linux. All it really does is make them spend their time learning the Raspberry Pi and they forget what they were actually there to learn in the first place.
I would say it makes more sense to use the RPi to learn what nooks and crannies we can stick computers into. Not simply embedded systems, but one that dynamically responds to I/O variances, etc. It's also a pretty good intro Python platform.
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@worden2 said in Where Does University Need to Focus for IT Students:
@scottalanmiller said in Where Does University Need to Focus for IT Students:
@jmoore said in Where Does University Need to Focus for IT Students:
@scottalanmiller I have no real experience in R but python works and is popular these days.
It's a lot like how people recommend using a Raspberry Pi to learn Linux. All it really does is make them spend their time learning the Raspberry Pi and they forget what they were actually there to learn in the first place.
I would say it makes more sense to use the RPi to learn what nooks and crannies we can stick computers into. Not simply embedded systems, but one that dynamically responds to I/O variances, etc. It's also a pretty good intro Python platform.
They are handy for helping people to understand what is a "computer" and what is a "PC". Breaking people of hardware dependencies or assumptions. But I dislike using them to teach anything else because they are so distracting. People struggle to figure out where the RP ends and the "fill in the blank with what they are trying to learn" begins. People end up associating aspects of ARM platforms or RP design or embedded systems with the thing they only see there.
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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.
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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.
