CIS Degree -- after 4 long years..my take on it all...

Unfortunately, I don't think it's any different anywhere else. In some places it may be even more theoretical. The practical stuff is probably left to community colleges in most places. In any case, jobs mostly overspecify what they want. They can't realistically expect people to have the diversity of skills outlined... Esp. not straight out of university.

There are some of us who enjoy teaching *way* more than the notion of research. I must say I prefer developing real life image processing applications than talking about theoretical aspects full of math. How to we make the program more realistic? Hard to know. Add more guest-lecture spots from industry? Put together symposiums on topics? The reality is that adding specific apps is harder than it appears.

I started my first real IT job as a system admin, most of what I had to learn I learned on the job. Admittedly systems are a little more complex now. I've never had a software job, so I can't comment there, always systems management before I decided to go back to grad school. Maybe CS profs need to spend a part of each year in industry, observing and being involved in some process... if even to embellish their teaching with real life knowledge. 490 projects with a real-life spin? Imagine as a 490 you worked on an in-house project somewhere where a prof was consulting as well, and you also got credit for coop?

Anyways ideas are always welcome...

Michael

That is one of the valid problems with co-op. The lack of quality employers for the number of students we have in the co-op prgoram.

XSL is one of those things that you pick up by going through a tutorial on w3schools website.

Students at Guelph generally don't have any web based background. I'll take PHP out of the equation because I've yet to see an enterprise that uses php for an enterprise level application. Concepts like JSP/Servlets, JavaBeans, Enterprise Java Beans, and J2EE are what a lot of companies are looking for if they're looking for someone to do web dev work. Not to mention Apache Struts and the new buzzword AJAX. None of these things will ever be taught to us at Guelph mainly because most of them aren't too hard to pick up, and also because historically, the web languages have evolved too quickly to ever incorporate them into a class.

I would have to hope that some professors at Guelph use Eclipse for their dev work (if they do any). I think Dr. Gardner might. If you want to get into things that they should force onto us it should be Apache Ant. 3rd year classes and higher should require Ant build.xml files for projects. Makefiles are great but they're not very helpful when you're trying to build your java application on a windows box at work. They should also force, Eclipse and Subversion (or CVS) on us too.

People would consider a Bachelor's degree 5 years of experience. I would consider it 0 years of experience. (I suppose you could convince someone that your project courses like software engineering count and add a year of valid experience). Developing a project in school is not like in industry, profs do a good job of trying to make it like industry, but until you've gone over time on your schedule for gathering requirements, rushed into development, cut out testing, only to determine you have the wrong requirements to begin with, will you actually gain industry experience.

With all this said, Guelph has done a relatively good job of preparing people for industry. We have the theory we need, we just need to figure out how to apply it, and then convince the people interviewing you that you know what you're talking about. Once you figure this out, you should be good.

I can agree with most here...

Coop is definately an excellent way to use your time in university to learn both theoretical and practical aspects. That said, Career Services offers a ton of services that Coop*1100 does. So I'm sure most of you haven't been there yet, but I strongly suggest checking it out.

Second, there's just too much to learn if you're expecting to be prepared for the real world after 4 years. CIS as well as many other programs encompass so many different things that we basically get a taste of whats out there, with hopefully enough knowledge so we have SOME type of foundation. Your databases course taught you the basics about DBs, anything more can be obtained by reading a book thats specific to a technology. If it is the case where you love to learn, it doesn't have to stop here.

Lastly, employers do over-shoot the skills that they are looking for when they post a job. If you find yourself having most of the skills, apply! If in the interview they ask, "how well do you know DBs?" and your reply is, "not very well.", then its your answers that are killing you. Employers know that the interviewed candidates don't have it all, but they want to know and see that you are taking steps to get as close as possible to that ideal. A better answer would be, "I have taken a databases course in the past where I know the foundations, but I'm also a quick learner who can step up to the challenge."

Anyways, these are just my 2cents. There's also a lot of competition right now (double cohort hitting us again) so its much more difficult this year. But keep trying, practice your resume/cover letter/interview skills, and maybe further your knowledge in a specific technology that you know employers are looking for. And oh yeah, NETWORK!

i got really lucky.. i had a job the summer before that involved databases, and so I messed around. then the next semester I had databases. I really felt it strengthened my ability to use databases a lot, I felt a lot more confident going back next summer and doing some major changes to increase the speed of the database almost infinitely (from sometimes crashing to instant).

i had an economics prof that said "you're here for theory. if you want to learn how to do something, goto college or get a job" I guess the point of that is... you knew what you were getting into.

to be honest I couldn't care less if I don't know web script or some other programming language. ya, I guess I would have liked to be forced into another database course though. but the other stuff... if you are good at school you are good enough to learn it on your own and apply it. the way i see it school's not about learning specifics, it's about learning how to learn.

in a month i'll have forgotten how to use torque, since i'll never use it again, and since we didn't learn how to use it properly so i took nothing out of that course. but in other courses where you're taught to program properly it applies to all languages.

i also feel that employers realize that. they want bright uni students, not so they can immediately make a difference, but so they can have them work a couple years and learn the industry and THEN be effective. but ya, you'll lose out to students who go out and learn all this stuff on their own and are also bright uni students... but i mean if they're going to go out on their own to learn it, as an employer i'd probably want to hire them first anyway.