Computer Science or Info Tech? 380
An anonymous reader writes "I am currently completing my final year of secondary schooling, and in the next few weeks I need to submit my university (or college to all you Americans) preferences for processing. I've decided that I want a career in the IT industry, but am unsure of whether to apply for a Computer Science course or an Information Technology course. I understand the difference between the two courses (CS being the study of the principles and concepts involved in Computing at a more fundamental, and often more sophisticated level, and IT being a more practical, application based approach to computing), but would like to know from anybody who has studied either or both of the courses what kinds of careers each course would lead into and what would you recommend for someone such as myself, having a broad range of interests and wishing to dabble in everything before deciding where to specialise?"
CS vs IT (Score:5, Insightful)
p.s. first post and actually fairly on topic
Re:CS vs IT (Score:5, Informative)
At the end of the day, CS writes the big applications, but you only write a couple at a time. IT/IS writes glue -- they take every service they need to run and make it run together - various directory services, authentication engines, web services, etc, etc..
Ask yourself, ultimately, do you want to write code that others rely on, or do you want to make a programmers code work the way it's supposed to?
Re:CS vs IT (Score:5, Insightful)
While you could well be right, the one absolute in university-level computing courses is that everything is relative.
Some places have an old-school CS course that teaches strong theory and is quite mathematical. This is probably good for someone who wants to deal with challenging programming work in the future: the kind of person who wouldn't just be writing a web front-end to use a database, they'd be writing the compiler and the database engine. These courses probably won't teach you to program in this week's greatest programming language or web/DB framework. What it will give you is a solid understanding of the principles and exposure to a broad range of ideas. With that sort of perspective, a CS grad should make short work of getting up to a reasonable level of competence in any industrial languages and technologies.
Sadly, it seems like an increasing number of places now run a "computer science" course that is basically just the latest industrial buzzwords. If you're looking at a course that teaches things like VB, XML, Windows/Linux system administration, business studies, web design, and the like, then IMHO that's not really computer science at all, it's just vocational training.
The potential scopes of other courses, such as "Information Technology", "Information Systems", "Software Engineering", are similarly wide-ranging, so it's hard to give advice about which course is best for someone without being able to see the details of what each really covers.
Re: (Score:2)
As important as computers are, I think there should be a lot more breadth in education. Yes, it's vocational training: it should then be possible for people to le
Re:CS vs IT (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing is, I don't think a CS education is something only a small number of people would need. Sure, it provides a deep understanding of some areas that little else does, but it also provides a broad base on which to build anything else you need in less specialised areas.
Put it this way: people who go into writing software without the kind of understanding of database construction and system design that a good CS course would teach are often the reason we get ludicrously slow applications, with ever-increasing hardware requirements, littered with security flaws, and the design behind the code — if it has one at all, instead of misunderstanding the buzzwords and thinking a set of tests is a substitute — is such a mess that no-one can fix it, and you have to either live with it or throw it all away and start from scratch.
(Before anyone replies, please note that I wrote "the kind of understanding ... that a good CS course would teach". Studying a formal CS course is certainly not the only way to gain this understanding.)
Re: (Score:2)
Sadly, it seems like an increasing number of places now run a "computer science" course that is basically just the latest industrial buzzwords. If you're looking at a course that teaches things like VB, XML, Windows/Linux system administration, business studies, web design, and the like, then IMHO that's not really computer science at all, it's just vocational training.
That was also true 20 years ago!!!
Case in point. We needed a practical, fast algorithm to assist in determining when hand-offs for cellu
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:CS vs IT (Score:5, Insightful)
IT is drudgery. It involves looking at how people use computers in everyday tasks... The fact that you read slashdot shows that you will find IT hugely boring, seriously. I've done two seperate IT courses, one for GCSE and one for A-Level. Both were as bland and meaningless as eachother.
During coursework I tried my hardest to get down to some technical points, but the specification doesn't allow for that kind of thing. It is more of a kind of "look how magic computers are? they run on magic!" kind of course, you never get down to the nitty gritty.
CS on the other hand is a level-up. The social sides of computing is less studied, and computers themselves are more studied. ICT is a general "I can do computers, me" course, whereas a CS degree is a) more interesting b) more challenging c) employers will recognise b
Re: (Score:2)
I suffered the same (school switched from CS to ICT the year I took it) and it is exactly as you describe it. My preferred label was "computer science mixed with business studies" - it's namby-pamby, watered-down crap, and was a complete waste of my time. Caned the coursework, though, with an OpenBSD-based web app doing school grades analysis. Everyone else was twatting around in Access or, at a push, doing something very mediocre in ASP.
But whether the same distinction applies at university l
Re: (Score:2)
At my School [etsu.edu] the average IT student is... well... not well equipped to... talk.
Re: (Score:2)
School is what you make of it. If you find the program boring, well, it just might be boring or you might not be in the right program. Guess what, life is 100% excitement. I
Re:CS vs IT (Score:5, Insightful)
* CS is more dificult, that's why I originally chose IT! I feared the math (IT requires 2 math courses while CS was closer to 9 but all ultimately most courses had a math background. CS is more math centric but you appreciate the inner workings of the field
* IT is more high level and you never quite dwelve in deep enough to appreciate things
* A good CS major can do any job an IT major can, but an IT major can not do everything a CS major can, so don't limit yourself!
* Whether you want to do sys admin or programming CS is a good choice, you'll learn how things work and you'll be better at troubleshooting advanced concepts.
* CS teaches you the theory. It's less practical application oriented but once you understand and appreciate the theory you can easily lean anything.
- Consider: A job might require you to program in visual basic to interface with an Oracle DB. If you went in IT, they might have taught you to use VB and Oracle, so you're all set. In CS, it's unlikely you did either but you took a programming languages course and a DB theory course which enables you to learn almost any language in a day. Now consider you get asked to switch from VB to C# and a mysql db. In IT you never touched either and you don't understand the basic language concepts so its harder for you to pick up both. With CS you still have the theoretical background with enables you to pick it up in a day. The same analogy trancents multiple areas (not just programming) like networking, operating systems, etc. This also applies to those who don't get a degree and just get a bunch of certs, eventually those certs become obsolete and its harder for those without a CS degree to adapt.
The only thing IT has over CS is some basic business courses, but if you get a CS degree, getting an MBA is trivial.
Think 15 years down the road (Score:4, Insightful)
Right out of school, IT may be the more useful degree. Why CS grads can get any IT jobs easily, if the outsourced HR recruiting firm is looking for IT, you'll struggle, because if you can't check the boxes, you don't get the interviews. However, your first job should be on-campus recruiting, so if you're careful, it won't make a difference.
Ten or fifteen years out, we'd all like to think that nobody cares about degrees, but it isn't true. Once you move up the food chain a bit, management LIKES degreed people. They are happy to hire programmers with high school degrees or even drop outs that can sling code, but once they need a technical lead, they don't want the gut without the degree. Sure, plenty of people will post here about how they are just fine without the degree, but it is a limitation, and the original poster has already decided to get the degree.
In 15 years, the IT degree will seem like a slightly upgrade Vo-Tech degree, and the CS degree will seem like a real engineering degree. This shouldn't matter, but it will. When you start dealing with managers with Ivy League (equivalent in your case) degrees and pedigrees, they'll see the CS-guy as one of them but more technical, they'll see the IT guy as below them.
Think nobody will care in 15 years what you did in your early 20s? Most people are unimpressive, they don't really do much during their life... for those people, their MOST measurable accomplishments are schooling, so they trade on it, and respect others that do as well. Hell, my high school, that I went to for three years, remains on my resume, because it's the top school in my area, and most of the people I interview with are trying to send their kids there (or are sending their kids there), and after fighting with the increasingly draconian admissions process, figure anyone that went there must be top notch.
You never know what will help in the future, so run with it.
Re:Think 15 years down the road (Score:5, Insightful)
For example, while the Fortune 250 firm I work for is shedding programmers and analysts like mad for outsourced options, it is also hiring project managers, auditors, information security analysts and risk managers who have a non-IT specialization like finance, marketing, legal/regulatory in conjunction with the IT foundation. These multi-domain specialists are critical in moving projects forward, especially when the programming staff is outsourced and someone has to relate business requirements to the outsourcing resource.
Having come up in telecom and IT, I went back and added a finance degree a few years ago and am now completing a masters in economics. I went from having a tough job competing over scarce network engineering positions to a senior position in operational risk. The key was mastering more than one business domain so my employer found I could work between different business units. Many of my friends who've been successful have taken the same approach and it is a great way to reach into a six-figure salary pretty quickly.
If you find you're quantitatively inclined, you might consider getting a double major in finance or statistics to complement that IT degree, rather than focusing on a CS degree. The quant can be harder and the job market is significantly different. Countless firms have a shortage of IT analysts in finance, data mining and other corporate decision-making fields.
As long as you're a replaceable commodity, you'll be at risk to outsourcing and low salary issues. Become someone who can help management understand their problem area and relate it to a technology solution and you'll do very well.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I disagree. I've never met a CS major who was worth a damn as a system administrator. It's a different mindset.
Re: (Score:2)
You may have been first post, but you still managed to confuse what CS actually is with what knobs from Goofball U. think it is.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Plan for Them Both, Take Your Time & Pick One (Score:5, Informative)
If you're planning on doing a two year technical college kind of thing then I recommend you to do otherwise. The auxillary courses that a four year technical college gave me have to a great extent been useful (possibly more so than the technical courses I took).
Assuming you've got a four year college plan, I would recommend you make two separate plans from your college's website. Take the IT path and pick out all your generals & then all your electives (it doesn't have to be accurate, just a rough guess). Then do the same with computer science. I'll bet you'll see that a lot of general electives overlap so take mostly those your first semester. While you're there, I think you'll be exposed to more students in the same and other realms. How do you so easily discount electrical engineering when IT & computer science are your obvious choices?
In America, there would be absolutely nothing wrong with changing from one to the other in the middle of your college career. It might mean more work but that's better than a lifetime of regret. In fact, it's almost expected you change your mind five or six times in college where I went to school. Sure, it'd take people five or six years to graduate but it's their choice.
I would recommend you do the above for not only IT & CSci but also EE & Computer Engineering (kind of a cross between CSci & EE). In my undergrad, I took CSci, Math & Music Theory courses to a heavy extent. I finished one class away from a math minor and one class away from a music minor. I'm really happy that I was able to take those diverse courses that were often a refreshing break from Computer Science. But, in the end, I almost wish I had committed to the Computer Engineering course even though it would have edged out the extra math and music I took because it is such a demanding program.
In the end, there's jobs in both these fields. I can't argue for one over the other because I don't like IT/Business people. Why do I hate them? Because I don't think they really care about anything other than money and they're often performing trivial jobs
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Well, I've never been through the British education system, only the American one. So I'll give you the advice I would give anyone I know in America.
To put this in context, that's pretty much the equivalent for someone asking a question about kernel programming being told:
Well, I've never used C, only the Perl one. So I'll give you the advice I would give anyone I know writing a Perl script.
I.e. it may be good advice, but it is completely irrelevant to the question. The UK and US education systems are very difficult, especially at the university level. The US system regards university as a progression from school, and is based around teaching students. The UK system regards university students as adults who are meant to be responsible for their own learning and is ba
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That's a thoughtful post, but the idea in it all that I like best is this: Don't make up your mind so easily.
Unless you're stubbornly sticking to a single path, going through college will probably change your view of where you'd like to be in 10 years. And then after you get out of college, setting out in the real world may change that view again. Working for 10 years on a given career path might make you want to change paths, or even change careers altogether. Things change more often than young people
Uh, no. Study CS if you want a career. (Score:4, Interesting)
A degree in IT requires the study of how to use and apply computers. A degree in CS requires the study of how to program computers.
If you get a degree in IT, you'll be able to get jobs in IT. If you get a degree in CS, you'll be able to get jobs in CS or IT. So, that CS degree gives you a lot more job options. Further, a lot of people in IT burn out on it, so if you got a degree in IT, you could end up stuck doing a job you hate, while if you get a degree in CS, you can transition back and forth between IT and programming jobs as you like.
To clarify further, while a programming manager won't hire an IT person as a programmer at any level (they didn't study it, after all, so theyd have to learn years of programming experience on the job), an IT director will generally hire a CS person as an entry level IT person, and then once you have that job experience it's easy to move up the IT ladder as you change jobs. (I went directly from lowly IT grunt in a larger company to IT director in a smaller one.) You really can learn how IT is done on the job, and since there are few barriers to moving up in the field (with so many burnouts there isn't as much experienced competition as you'd expect) it's much better to have that CS degree and then if you want to do IT, work your way up in it.
Biz App Bashing? (Score:2)
Are you talking business application programming? If so, you should be modded a "troll". If they were "trivial" they would be trivial to automate, and all the biz programmers would be out of business. It is often a complex mental excercise to take a lot of business rules and try to simplify them and
depends, of course (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
How is your math? (Score:3, Funny)
Do you like math? Are you good at it? What about algorithms? Do self-balancing binary search trees give you a boner? If you answered yes to lots of these questions, stick with Computer Science.
On the other hand, "IT" sounds like a "Microsoft Office with some introductory Java on the side" course. You might want to find some better middle ground if you actually want to do some serious work.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Avoid information degrees like the plague. They're half assed awards aiming at the market a poor programer will find easy - mostly web systems. I believe in a hierarchy of programming and sadly the information or enterprise courses aim to make web monkeys - web monkeys find it harder to breakout of their web niche which is quickly becoming over populated with causal programmers (who are coming more and more skilled!) such as college grads and drop outs.
I did a software engineering degree with electroni
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I would agree, based on a general principle. As a young person, when in doubt, take the harder path. The harder degree opens more doors, and when you are young, opening doors is why you are getting your quals, even when you don't know what you want to do exactly. As other posters in this thread have stated, there is no job for which an IT degree qualifies you that a CS degree does not qualify you better. Go for the CS degree. A little bit of a side note: like the
Get a job (Score:4, Insightful)
So instead of worrying exactly which degree to take, just get the one that you think you will enjoy most. It's going to be your life for years - if you don't enjoy it, it'll kill you. I did engineering, because it was fun, and I got offers from the IT industry when I graduated as well as elsewhere. There were plenty of people with maths and physics degrees heading into IT as well.
Much more important is to get employment in the right field. Even if it's an unpaid weekend job, or summers doing network admin stuff. Steady employment and a track record is much more impressive than anything most of your competitors will have at the start of the mad rush to hire graduates. The closer it is to your field the better, and if you can pick a company that will keep having you back and give you more impressive things to do that's great.
Even if they (or you) don't want to turn things permanent after college, then you will already have a headstart on networking in your field, proof you can work for a week in an office without putting laxative in the coffee and good things to talk about at interviews.
Depends (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
That's a horrible metric. I work in the financial services industry (i.e. not the tech industry). I'm not even in a programming position (I'm in network engineering), and myself and a lot of the people I work with have either engineering, computer science, or math degrees. When you move into the devel
MIS (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
My vote: CS (Score:4, Informative)
I hold a BA in Computer Science, and would highly recommend its study. The principles you learn are not solely relegated to computer science -- at least, not most of them. I've been able to successfully apply them to the fields of physics and mathematics in college, and continued to do so to problems in my research in the fields of nuclear engineering and fusion energy science today. It certainly has aided my job as a scientist -- a position you may not have considered relevant to CS/IT. Keep it in mind, we always need more bright people! :)
That said, I'm a bit of a jack-of-all-trades when it comes to IT. It certainly is helpful to be able to solve a problem with the tools at hand. IT problems tend to be a bit more lucrative to solve (or solve more efficiently than those who came before you).
If you plan on being a creative problem-solver in your chosen line of work, seriously consider the perspective a CS background can offer. In my mind, that gives you the ability to pick up whatever the latest nifty tools/utilities that help you solve your day-to-day problems.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Cherry-pick! (Score:3, Interesting)
If you really want to understand the subject, take overlapping courses from both specialties. You'll need to know how both communities think to do well in either.
I had to do this in math: to understand calculus, you needed both the practical eamples, taught only in the engineering course, and know how the theroms worked, taught only in the "pure" maths courses. So I took one and audited the other, and and aced them both after getting an F in the previous term (;-))
This worked for computer science and software engineering too, and in my current job consulting in IT, I use a lot of science...
Repost? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Look, folks, what *your* school taught you under the umbrella of (CS/IT/IS/MIS/SWE/CE) is not what every school teaches it as. I've actually found 2 schools up here in Canada that teach 2 subjects in exactly opposite directions - one has CS being mainly theoretical and programming, with CE being hardware and such - and the other school used the labels enti
If I had to do it again.... (Score:4, Informative)
I would go for accounting and a minor in computers....
First, all anyone cares about 3+ years down the road is you have a degree in something more technical than basket weaving. I have worked with computers my entire career and have a technical degree but it is not Comp-Sci. When the new manager finds out what the degree is, I get no problems as it is a harder degree to get that Comp-Sci.
Second, by having a degree in something other than computers gives you a business advantage. Say you had accounting, then configuring SAP or some other ERP system and understanding a credit and debit, journal entries etc. will all be simple to you.
One good thing about college/universities is they teach you how to learn... using that you can self learn any I/T skill you will need. In fact, a C/S degree does not adequately prepare people technically anyway, and many with a C/S come into the work force thinking they are prepared when they are not. They soon realize that technical skills development is a life long endeavor in this I/T business.
The other advantage is if you don't like it you have a second career path... I/T is not for everyone. And if you have the smarts to be really good technically in I/T, getting a degree leading to a CA should not be hard at all.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
(i) You went to a school with a really bad "diploma mill" CS program, and the CS courses you took for your minor reflected this.
(ii) As a CS minor, you avoided the hard CS classes, the stuff that CS majors have to learn that sets computer scientists apart from code monkeys.
Seriously. Accounting isn't a bullshit non-degree like most business degrees -- good accountants have to be reasonably smart p
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: IT + X (Score:2)
Some of you out there are *really sharp*. "9 math courses, pfft, piece of cake". However, of the million+ registered users I am positive a large segment are looking at that remark thinking, "Kudos to you too sir, but what can *I* do?" It's not a zero sum "Everest or Bust" proposition. I'd say 2007 is a good marquee year to declare that every growing company in the world has *some* kind of computer system; no one relegates that to the "nerd" department anymore.
Howe
Whatever. (Score:2)
I work with a bunch of excellent IT professionals, and many of them don't have any kind of technical degree. That being said, I think a strong foundation in computer science is very useful.
An understanding of how "computers work" and what is possible versus impractical or even impossible is, in the least, advantageous. It -is- useful to know how the guts of an operating system works, and why. It is good to know about the detail
Follow your passion (Score:2)
Go for computer science (Score:2)
In the end, most computer science majors will end up in
Always start off with the most difficult option... (Score:2, Troll)
I would pick CS or even EE to start off with, if you have any ability to change later on. Why? Having switched from an IT-esque major (Management Information Systems) up to CS, it's a lot easier the other way around. CS requires, at least in my experience, real math and science courses that more than cover the weak requirements for graduating with a "lower" major, so if you start off there, you're covered no matter what and don't have to take calculus or physics again--whereas with lower majors, you more th
Re: (Score:2)
College, and the assortment of majors within, are something of an intelligence test. A hard science, comp sci, or engineering degree demonstrates you're intelligent--an IT or business IS degree suggests, at best, that you preferred to party and didn't really give a shit about your education
I take grave offense to this. Sure, if you go to some no-named school that only has a bachelors in Business Administration, or get a General Business degree, sure. But if you go to a good school, such as the University of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, etc., they all have very competitive Business Schools. Myself, I go to Madison, where getting into the university isn't necessarily the easiest thing to do (didn't have any problems with that), and have been in the Business School for the past year, t
Re:competition (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I've had the "pleasure" of tutoring business school students at one of the schools you name (Minnesota). The b-school may be good by b-school standards, but that's like saying your shit is unusually sweet-smelling by shit standards. Business school is school for people who want a degree but are afraid of thinking.
Re:Always start off with the most difficult option (Score:2)
hard science, comp sci, or engineering degree demonstrates you're intelligent--an IT or business IS degree suggests, at best, that you preferred to party and didn't really give a shit about your education. (There is some value to a business degree, but it's almost always preferable to get an undergraduate degree in a legitimate area of study and, if necessary, an MBA later on.)
True, but there is a hitch. In my case, I took the most challengin
You have to decide (Score:2)
This is something that you are going to have to decide, you can't ask slashdot and get an easy answer that way. Generally speaking you are going to have the CS people telling you to take CS, and IT people telling you to take IT, which really isn't helpful. At the end of the day, you have to determine which road is the one you want to go down. If possible, you may want to take the first year without declaring a major and just explore the two options (plus anything else you think you may want to do, its pe
CS or Tech (Score:2)
Where are you most comfortable—talking about things or doing them? If the former, go for CS. Otherwise, you are welcome to join the rest of us in the gritty real world.
Kidding aside, if you really do have a broad range of interests and want room to tinker and explore, you would probably find the narrowness of a CS curriculum stultifying. Tech will give you all the interesting and useful parts of CS and a rich gamut of other topics as well.
plan an escape route (Score:2)
Most courses are far too academic and let's face it, behind the times, to be relevant for IT job-seeking. Stuff you learn in the first year of your course will either be mainstream or have sunk-without-trace by the time you graduate. Therefore only stuff you study in the final year will be relevant to employers.
Most IT jobs are sheer dru
Depends on how far you want to go with your life (Score:2)
IT guys can jump from job to job much easier, because IT jobs are almost McJobs at this point. But if you value having a longer career, stick with t
depends on how good you are at math (Score:2)
if algorithms make your heart beat faster, then go for cs.
if the thought of calculus makes you wince, go for IT.
regardless of the actual presence of math in either field, a CS curriculum will be much heavier on math *stuff*.
another option that is emerging in some colleges in the US are "media" programs [nku.edu] that focus on content for the web. these are creative programs that focus on the web with opportunities to focus on design, graphics, writing, or A/V production for delivery to the web.
Re: (Score:2)
if the thought of calculus makes you wince, go for IT.
If the thought of calculus makes you wince, do the world a favor and stay the hell out of anything having to do with computers.
Computer Science (Score:2)
Go with Computer Science. Theory trumps practical knowledge nearly every time. If you understand the fundamentals of computing, you can use that knowledge and apply it elsewhere with great success.
Combine the two! (Score:2)
I knew this chick who had CIST and well... she wasn't hot but she was pretty popular with some guys and stuff...
Get a CS degree (Score:2)
why you are choosing certain solutions.
I've worked with a great deal of people whose education is some kind of IT programme and they are limited in their ability to understand the underlying
reasons behind what is happening with their systems. With a CS degree, you can also move between an software development career and an IT career
if you decide. Ver
Theoretical vs Practical (Score:2)
Take your time (Score:2)
1) aim high and 2) learn a profession (Score:4, Interesting)
Translating this to CS/IT: a programmer can easily become a sys-admin, but I don't see that happen so quickly the other way around. BTW, I'm saying all this with 25 years experience behind the belt. I've even been a short while on the other side of the fence, teaching CS/IT at the university.
The other part --aim high-- is simple. Which of your two options would be the biggest challenge to complete. Pick that one!! You can always downgrade, it's much tougher to upgrade.
Study CS. Become a quant. (Score:2)
Of the three really good young people, all with robotics and control experience, who worked on our DARPA Grand Challenge robot vehicle, two are now in financial engineering. One is running a hedge fund out of Santa Fe that's driven by program trading. One is in the Bahamas with an offshore fund. The third is running an iPhone group at Apple.
But these are top people. If you can handle the math, get an undergrad CS degree, then an MBA. If you're further down the food chain, an IT career is an option.
CS will make you a better IT person (Score:2)
so... (Score:4, Insightful)
Irrelevant (Score:2)
But don't despair just yet. University is actually of great help with starting your network, and
IT: stationary engineering for a new generation (Score:2)
"Information technology" is a lot like stationary engineering [iuoe.org] as a career. Once upon a time, around 1900, stationary engineering was the hot field to get into. People were needed to run the high technology that made the wheels of the world go around - steam engines, generating plants, heavy industrial machinery. It was a new field - vast amounts of machinery were being built and installed, the technology was advancing rapidly, and the world was changing drastically as, for the first time in history, pow
Vague? Look to what you want to know (Score:2)
For getting your first IT job, the nature of your degree doesn't matter a whole lot. Your knowledge, skills and interests do. For getting your second job, your degree matters even less, and your resume and demonstrable skills matter even more.
Choose a degree that is going to give you the knowledge you want for the fiel
I'd suggest looking at job descriptions (Score:2)
I've never been to Uni, so I'm not exactly in a position to say what the relative merits of one course over the other is. What I will say, from the point of view of someone who reads job descriptions a fair amount, is that most recruiters seem to list a good CS degree as requirement for most programming roles. Whether that's because it's what they actually want, or because that's what they think they want, I couldn't say for certain.
From talking to a friend who works in management, and with various othe
IT the new DP? (Score:2)
I have BS and MS degrees in CS, but I've worked some jobs that could be described as IT-ish. One nice th
Least limiting? (Score:2)
Take whatever degree gives you the most options. Can you do a Phd in IT, I doubt it.
My advice take the CS as it opens doors to other fields. IT is a pretty hard way to make a steady living, it's all boom and bust. Can be good fun if you have some savings but hell if you acquire any debt. You need to be able to quit when you want to survive.
Just a few thoughts (Score:2)
Instead I will make a few really obvious points about which university to choose.
Obviously you will try to get into the best university your test scores allow. If you are e.g. in a position to go to MIT or Stanford or one of the other top universities ... that will be more important in your career than which exact curriculum you
Choose CS or science or engineering; not pure IT. (Score:2)
Disclaimer: I am prejudiced. I don't have a CS or IT degree, I am a scientist by training. And if I look at the fate of most people with IT degrees in our organization, I can only have pity on them.
If you want to have a real career, then by all means retain your broad range of interests. "Dabbling" is okay, but perhaps you want to specialize a bit -- to consider for a moment to what field you would want to apply these computing skills. If you would enjoy writing financial software, you'll better know some
Go for what interests you. (Score:2)
Computing in general is a fairly broad field. Off the top of my head, I can think of:
Liberal Arts (Score:4, Insightful)
It may be harder to land that killer job at your dream company right out of school, but if you're like most people, you'll grow and change over the years, and you'll look back and think to yourself that you're so glad you didn't get that job, or even better, how funny it is that you're now running the company that didn't take you as an entry level employee.
Liberal arts are severely underappreciated in this world. The more bright, interesting people who refuse to over-focus too early in their careers, the better the world will be; please do your part.
So study your technology. But this is an undergraduate degree; treat it like a beginning, not an end. The race is a long one, and you really don't need to be going full speed out of the gate.
If you have to ask... (Score:2)
BA with a speciality with I.T. or Info tech (Score:2)
It is true that alot of jobs from HR require a cs degree but alot have most of their developers in India who have no sense of business.
Also many Information tech programs with a business twist teach you object oriented design and principles. This is very important and not taught in cs programs where the focus is unpractical calculus programs.
Easy answer (Score:2)
You like computers, but aren't sure where you are going, CS.
I recommend CS because it is very doubtfull YOu know where life is going to take you.
I recommend taking a minor in business. It will elp you immeasurably.
I am now going to tell you how to keep themost control over your life and always have power over your employeers:
Live as far below your means as you can. Never get a loan for anything except a home. A home is the exception because i
Only you can answer it (Score:2)
To get you on the right way, I will ask you a few questions instead...
Why have you decided upon a career in the IT industry? Why do you want a career in the first place, and not just a job? What do you view as important in a future job? Regular hours? Lots of overtime? High responsibility? Log off, and go on go home to your family/friends/hobby/etc? High pay? Having a work that you find ethically responsible? Male-dominated? Both sexes? Corporate machiner
Keep your options open (Score:2)
If you want to have a business degre
From a US guy's point of view... (Score:3, Informative)
At the University of Oklahoma (and at most universities in the USA), universities break up into Colleges by discipline grouping, and each College generally has an associated "quality" level. At the University of Oklahoma, and at most US institutions, this perceived quality level breaks down as follows:
Tier I:
Engineering
Medical
Law
Tier II:
Business
Science
Tier III:
Liberal Arts
Tier IV:
Education
Depending on the University in question, individual programs within the various tiers may move up or down a level. The University of Texas, for example, has an outstanding Computer Science curriculum that is organized under the "Science" banner, but it is without a doubt a Tier I program, UC Berkley's Chemistry program is Tier I, etc. And I'm sure there are universities with absolutely terrible engineering programs that might be better off as falling under Tier II. But that said, in general, the discipline groupings break down as above.
At the University of Oklahoma, the Computer Science department falls under the umbrella of the College of Engineering. They have to take all the calculus the engineers do, one of the two engineering physics undergrad classes, and an additional hard science chemistry class. (ie, they swap out Eng Phys II for Chem II). The Computer Science curriculum is considered by most folks in the College of Engineering to be a tier II engineering curriculum, which is to say that it's considered to be an average program in the College of Engineering (... but because engineering falls into Tier I, it's still a Tier I program...)
Now to the point:
At the University of Oklahoma, our "IT" degree is known as Management Information Systems (MIS). It falls under the business college. It's like this at most universities in the USA. At most universities in the USA, it also happens to fall on the lowest rung of the business college; it's the very lowest tier. At the top are accounting, finance and economics, then everyone else, then at the very bottom is MIS. It's bad when even the marketing majors have more to be proud of.
MIS is where all the kids who tried and failed at CS end up. MIS is where a lot of the kids who tried and failed at accounting, finance and economics end up. MIS is where the dregs go. It is at the bottom of the barrel. Most of the time, the MIS programs are so bad that they fall out of Tier II (as above) directly into Tier III or IV.
Now, this is not to say that everyone who is in MIS is a low quality churl. But because it's where the low quality churls end up, you will often find that it's what's expected of MIS majors. Many people, myself included, have zero respect for MIS degrees.
I guess IT could be different in Britain, but I doubt it.
I would recommend going for either an engineering degree or a computer science degree, and if you really want business exposure, take some business classes as electives or pursue an MBA style graduate degree.
And as another piece of advice: If you haven't already, become skilled at public speaking; take some classes if you need to. There are many, many sins that can be made up for when you have the ability to give a good presentation.
Essentially correct (Score:5, Insightful)
Choose scientist over technician.
Re:Essentially correct (Score:4, Interesting)
What you are saying may hold some truth at the entry level and that is only because entry-level IT jobs have a fuzzier skill requirement than entry-level CS jobs. And that may largely be a function of IT being more of a trade field with many specializations possible; CS jobs tend to share the same horizontal underpinnings.
The hard parts of IT are learned on the job, much like the hard parts of software engineering. A fresh CS Ph.D. could be equally worthless as a software architect or IT architect.
How often do you see a classically trained computer scientist (with no IT experience) hired to design and implement worldwide data center operations for an international Internet company serving hundreds of millions of users per day?
About as often as you see a CIO hired to design the search algorithm that's going to be deployed in those data centers.
Any interchangeability of IT and CS for IT jobs goes away after you move up from grunt work. A key difference is that it's easier to bullshit your way into higher-level CS work because society has been conditioned to accept inferior software as the norm. In contrast, when IT doesn't work, companies can't do business, and when the company can't do business, people get fired.
Re:Essentially correct (Score:4, Insightful)
I hope you aren't suggesting that someone fresh out of school with an IT degree would be suited for this task either. We are talking about entry level jobs here, and there really isn't an entry level IT job that a CS grad couldn't do that an IT grad could based solely on their educational background.
I'm certainly not saying that getting a degree in CS is better per-say, but it does without a doubt open more doors at the entry level. If someone is absolutely sure they only want to do IT, I hardly see anything wrong with focusing their education on it. The education will be easier, but that doesn't mean the real world work will be. Serious IT work requires experience and bright people. There is nothing shameful about doing this sort of work, and the people who are really good at it are incredibly valuable to society.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Essentially correct (Score:4, Insightful)
I love technical/programming work so this doesn't bother me but just letting you know that all the moolah are in financial/business IT nowadays. Not all IT graduates end up in technician type jobs, in fact compared to CS grads they probably have more of a chance climbing up the corporate ladder. I know of a few IT grads who have started out as junior business analysts and worked their way up to project managers in years. Of course these aren't research/technical companies but in an IT department of your average bank.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
CS, of course. This at least gives you the dream that you will not just be reinventing wheels for company XYZ.
Don't waste your time with either CS or IT, or at least don't worry to much about it. IT majors tend to lack free thinking and CS majors tend to lack practical skills (I wouldn't hire a CS grad with less than 4 years of practical experience for a even a Junior Developers position). Instead you can either take the slow rewarding route and get a CE/CSE degree and hopefully get an opportunity to work on embedded systems or semi-conductor design, or the fast a dirty route and enter a Liberal Arts program whi
Re:choose scientist over technician (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:choose scientist over technician (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I've met both UNIX and Windows sys admins in the real world who are products of some of these courses -- and let me tell you, they leave a lot to be desired. Even UNIX admins often fail to unde
via simple modern day resume skills (Score:3, Funny)
They lie through their teeth.
next question.
Re: (Score:2)
Everything that is on top of Slashdot is on top of Slashdot at one point or another.
Re: (Score:2)
CS majors are a bit ahead because they can write complex algorythms and do a lot of low level things, but thats just a fraction of what software development is. Very, very few colleges will offer the appropriate software development and engineering classes required to do real software development and architecture, but those, alon
Re: (Score:2)
You -have- to implement incredibly advanced concepts. Those concepts are just not CS. Software architecture, development methods, design patterns, the development decision trees (just to name the simpler ones that most should have heard of), and more, could easily fill an undergraduate curriculum.
The thing is, most programmers, especially those that come from the CS worlds, don't even KNOW they need this, because all they do is follow the orders of someone with 10+ years of experi
Re: (Score:2)
I don't know if there are the equivalent of two-year community/junior colleges in England, so that might explain a lack of the word "college" in an Englishman's vocabulary. I suppose an analog of t
Re: (Score:2)
You're one of the lucky ones then, Uni is a foot in the door for most people. People with exceptional talent will always succeed, not everyone is that fortunate. Some of us are just competent.