wildchocolate

First, I want to make it clear before I begin that I am not at all discrediting the value of a college education. There’s no better time or place to immerse yourself in knowledge, collaboration and growth than on a world class college campus, and this experience should definitely not be passed up. It’s just that the further I get from college (2 years out now) the more I realize the limitations of college curricula in preparing students for careers in the arena of computer science, as well as entrepreneurship. I’m not going to try and generalize my case to argue that the same issue applies to other fields of study like pre-law or communications, areas of which I have no personal knowledge and would most likely be wrong. But I am going to tell you my story.

Today at this moment, I am a software developer/entrepreneur and loving every minute of it. My college major: not computer science or business/entrepreneurship. How did that happen? To tell you the truth, I’m not quite sure where I was headed when I left my university, industrial engineering degree in hand. But I certainly didn’t know it would be here.

Perhaps this would also be a good time to back up and explain where my interest in computer science comes from, since I obviously didn’t pursue it as a major (although I did take a lot of classes and ended up with a minor). When I was a little girl, I loved math, science, and writing. What did I want to pursue for a career? Writing of course! Yeah, it’s confusing to me too. But I was set on becoming a journalist from the day I won a writing contest in the 6th grade and received a reporter’s notebook as a prize. This lasted until high school when my passion for math and science seemed to overtake everything else, and I started to go the medical technology route. I completely had a blinder on computer science even though it was one of my favorite classes and I got a near perfect store on the AP test (not that I really put a lot of stock in test scores, but that’s another article).

I enrolled in engineering school and listed my major as biomedical engineering. That lasted through freshman year. The next year, I realized that wasn’t right. So I studied all the other types of engineering, and I switched to the one that seemed to fit the most, industrial engineering. The curriculum (for those not familiar with the field) basically applies engineering to business problems. It wasn’t until having a heart to heart with my boyfriend who was/is extremely talented and passionate about computer science, that I allowed that career path to be in my consideration. By that time, it was too late to switch gears (hence the minor). However, since I did take nearly all the major required classes for computer science, and also spent time researching the curriculums at other universities, I do feel qualified to share my perspective on its shortcomings.

During my computer science classes, I did not learn how to manage a project with tens of thousands of lines of code, how to use version control tools, or any strategies for learning new languages. These are key skills that you need on day one at any software or web development job. I definitely did not learn the role of user experience specialists, testers, interface designers, back-end web developers, programmers, project managers, or how all these people fit together to create a product. Nor did they teach me the pros and cons of having dedicated QA, large vs small programming teams, or the issues with back-supporting hardware as new technologies become available. Hello?! That would be like studying business and never knowing the role of the CEO vs the CFO, or a pre-med student not knowing the first thing about triage in hospitals. Does that seem right to you?

Moving on to business and entrepreneurship, much of my industrial engineering coursework was business oriented. But they didn’t teach me how to set up an LLC, or the complications of taxes that get mixed into accounting. I never once learned about a company that started up without investor funding, without a BS business plan, and without imaginary valuations (even though companies without these things are in abundance in the real world). In fact, my team got a C in entrepreneurship class because we presented an idea without a made-up valuation or estimate of how many people would visit the site arguing you just can’t estimate that with any degree of accuracy and plus with practically no barrier to entry, you don’t need funding to start a website. Funny enough, we were exactly right! But you win some, you lose some.

Now, some of the previously mentioned topics cannot or should not be covered in school. I’m not suggesting that entrepreneurship classes cut valuation from the topics list, or that Intro to Accounting should cover the intricacies of LLCs. Some of that information just wouldn’t make sense to teach to undergrads anyway. My point is simply that I now realize the limits of academia in preparing you for these kinds of careers. I also realize the opportunities to expand and improve computer science and business curriculums.

More research is needed to understand just how these curriculums are formed, but based on what I’m seeing there is no way that computer science departments are consulting enough with real world software and web developers. If they were, then they would know that 90% of the critical skills are not being covered in class. The real innovation is developing outside of universities every day! This has impacted my view of academia to be too theoretical and not connected enough with what’s really going on, and has diminished my opinion of graduate and advanced degree work. I wonder if anyone can prove me wrong?