I studied engineering, not English. I still can't find a job
washingtonpost.com
I studied engineering, not English. I still can't find a job
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Re: I studied engineering, not English. I still can't find a job
#2Reading the article raised tangential questions for me: How comfortable is it for someone who's not a programmer by temperament or interest to get a computer science degree in college? Or, alternately, what percentage of computer science grads simply aren't programmers? I've never really thought about this but now I'm wondering!
Re: I studied engineering, not English. I still can't find a job
#3Reading the article raised tangential questions for me: How comfortable is it for someone who's not a programmer by temperament or interest to get a computer science degree in college? Or, alternately, what percentage of computer science grads simply aren't programmers? I've never really thought about this but now I'm wondering!
Having taught university students in "computing studies", I'd venture to guess that it isn't that big of a deal for them to go through the motions of the course and eek out a pass by acing the essay questions. I don't have any statistics, but I'd guess about half of them would have had a hard time putting two lines of code together. Back then (late nineties), it was the ideal major for people who didn't know what to major in. Enrollment in the UK is down since then because the generation that grew up equating computer science with using microsoft office (thanks to Bill Gates lobbying Tony Blair) has come of age, and the educational authorities are trying desperately to repair the curriculum. The last time I applied for a teaching job (two or three years ago) the curriculum I was expected to teach looked like it could have been written in the eighties. The job went to someone with more teaching experience than me.
Edit: I met a former student on the London Underground some years later who wasn't much good at anything in school besides cracking onto his female colleagues, but got serious after that and ended up scoring a decent programming job in finance. Academic performance might not be such a good predictor of later success.
Re: I studied engineering, not English. I still can't find a job
#4You might get the impression that the author studied engineering ("I studied engineering, not English...") or perhaps computer science ("...graduated at the top of my class in computer science...") whereas a quick look at his LinkedIn profile shows that he studied Management Information Systems[0] which, as far as I can tell, is a non-degree along the same lines as "Marketing" or "Media and Journalism" i.e. light on technical skills and heavy on jargon and buzzwords.
Re: I studied engineering, not English. I still can't find a job
#5"Maybe it’s a crazy idea, but if you’re going to spend all that money for a college education, shouldn’t you expect to learn real-world skills from people who know what they’re doing?"
Maybe it's a crazy idea, but universities are not, and were never intended to be, career training centers. Helping you get a job is just not the mission of these institutions. And it's just as well; it would be highly unfortunate for the academic field of computer science if the undergraduate curriculum focused on how to use current tools like Eclipse or Ruby on Rails or Angular.js. Universities are designed to give you a firm grounding in the fundamental concepts, which should give you the ability to understand whatever tools are in fashion in the industry with relative ease. Besides, if you're not doing any hacking in your free time outside of class anyway, you're probably not cut out for this career.
Re: I studied engineering, not English. I still can't find a job
#6Reading the article raised tangential questions for me: How comfortable is it for someone who's not a programmer by temperament or interest to get a computer science degree in college? Or, alternately, what percentage of computer science grads simply aren't programmers? I've never really thought about this but now I'm wondering!
I think it's a small percentage but there are a few for sure. In my last position, I worked with a few comp-sci grads who were "not programmers" (their words) and had really no interest in programming. They just wanted to play with technology and kind of strategize around it.
Re: I studied engineering, not English. I still can't find a job
#7You might get the impression that the author studied engineering (" I studied engineering, not English... ") or perhaps computer science (" ...graduated at the top of my class in computer science... ") whereas a quick look at his LinkedIn profile shows that he studied Management Information Systems[0] which, as far as I can tell, is a non-degree along the same lines as "Marketing" or "Media and Journalism" i.e. light…
I have an MIS degree, and generally, you're correct. They're light on technology, though I did learn some basics. I already knew a lot of that already, though... what I learned the most from were the Accounting, Marketing, and Business Management classes I took.
Re: I studied engineering, not English. I still can't find a job
#8You might get the impression that the author studied engineering (" I studied engineering, not English... ") or perhaps computer science (" ...graduated at the top of my class in computer science... ") whereas a quick look at his LinkedIn profile shows that he studied Management Information Systems[0] which, as far as I can tell, is a non-degree along the same lines as "Marketing" or "Media and Journalism" i.e. light…
The first paragraph says it all:
>According to Alan Morrison of PwC, "The new analytics is the art and science of turning the invisible into to visible...It's about detecting opportunities and threats you hadn't anticipated, or finding people you didn't know existed who could be your next customers. It's about learning what's really important, rather than what you thought was important. It's about identifying, committing, and following through on what your enterprise must change most."
Re: I studied engineering, not English. I still can't find a job
#9You might get the impression that the author studied engineering (" I studied engineering, not English... ") or perhaps computer science (" ...graduated at the top of my class in computer science... ") whereas a quick look at his LinkedIn profile shows that he studied Management Information Systems[0] which, as far as I can tell, is a non-degree along the same lines as "Marketing" or "Media and Journalism" i.e. light…
I didn't verify that he had an MIS degree... but MIS is definitely not the same thing as Computer Science or Engineering. If this is true it's a fairly disingenuous and manipulative article.
Re: I studied engineering, not English. I still can't find a job
#10Yet-another-whining-about-college-education. Frankly, this is the most appropriate place to scream, "get a job, man."
I never understanding these complains about how bad college education is. We talking about America here, the land of individualism, of self-interest, of self-discovery. It seems like everyone expects 5-year-old kids to pace their studies. Yet, funnily, if it's college, the professors have to decide what the students need for "real world." What gives? So elementary pupils know what they need to learn, but college students (aka 18+) do not?
On a closely related note: half of all technology workers have no formal education, the article said. Wait, if those workers can learn by themselves, can't our precious, innocent, poorly taught college students get off their behinds and study those, too? Rather than whining about how their professors are not familiar with, you know, "real-world" experience, why not focus on what they are familiar with? Can you go out to a real world and expect those to know the greatest and latest algorithms and languages and formal definitions, their pros and cons and applications? Or how, says, Windows applications and AJAX applications are similar and different. Or a thousands of those long-term researches that businesses just can't afford to do. No. That's why we need professors and researchers.
Geez. Get a job, will ya?