An interesting interview question.....

[poltr1]

Last week, one of my interviewers asked me the question, "How has your university training prepared you for the job?" I answered, "It hasn't." I went on to explain that many of the languages and technologies in use today weren't developed 20 years ago, and the ones that were are rarely used today. Most of what I use today I either learned on the job or on my own. Also, my alma mater's CS department's primary focus was to prepare students for graduate school, not industry.


What computer science courses did I take in college? Computer Science I and II, using Pascal. (I think cigfran_cg was my teaching assistant.) Assembly language, using a VAX. Lisp. Programming languages, which covered C, Lisp, and Pascal. Computer graphics, which used DI-3000. Analysis of algorithms. Compiler design. Discrete mathematics I and II. Artificial intelligence, using Lisp, Prolog, and OPS 5. Finite state theory. And maybe a few more that I've forgotten. There were no teachers for software engineering or database design, so those courses weren't taught.

I don't think anyone uses Pascal anymore. VAXen are few and far between. C is still widely used. Who uses Lisp these days?

I should mention the politics of the department. Based on the interests of the faculty, it was heavily into math and artificial intelligence. They rarely (if ever) communicated with the electrical engineering department. After moving to Dayton, I thought about going to Wright State University for a master's degree. But I was told that I'd have to take a number of undergrad courses before I could be considered for the program, because their CS program was so much different from the one I was through.

I've since heard that the computer science department is now part of the school of engineering at my alma mater, the CS and EE departments talk to each other regularly, and the curriculum has changed. I'd imagine all the instructors I've had have either retired or passed away.

Comments

[bikergeek.livejournal.com]

The big thing a university education is supposed to give you is that you learn how to learn. Sure, you might have learned COBOL and FORTRAN and Lisp back in the day, but the university education theoretically gives you the ability to pick up a random O'Reilly book and teach yourself perl or ruby or python.

[fleetfootmike.livejournal.com]

It also, in my case, taught me some basic concepts that are language indepedent: pointers, arrays, ways to represent strings, sorts, hash tables etc...

And if some of my soon to be ex-colleagues in Y! India had paid attention, they wouldn't be about to waste god knows how long rewriting a slow Perl application to become a slow Erlang application. /I/ know it's possible to write a Perl app with an event loop that'll handle 500+ requests a second: the fact that theirs only handles 40 suggests to me that the problem ISN'T the language....

# event loop
while (1) {
   sleep 1;
   # process incoming requetss 
   # ...
}

....does not bode well....

[bikergeek.livejournal.com]

oh yeah, and I'm gonna reveal the fact that I live in what is arguably the education capital of the USA by snipping a bit of poltr1's original post here:

"How has your university training prepared you for the job?"

Universities aren't about training, they're about education. "Training" is what you get from a vo-tech school or a two-week certification class. Training is all about teaching someone to do the same task repeatedly. Education, on the other hand, is about meta-skills like resourcefulness, critical thinking, problem-solving, how to do research, and how to learn.

Both of them have immense value but they shouldn't be confused with one another.

One correct smartass answer might have been, "Universities taught me how to navigate large, hierarchical bureaucracies." (Which is actually what more than one acquaintance has said was one of the more valuable parts of his or her university education.)

[poltr1]

I did learn COBOL and FORTRAN, but they were taught by the night school and the engineering school, respectively. The CS department wouldn't touch those languages.

I didn't really learn how to learn until I did some freelance work for a doctoral dissertation student who was trying to establish key trends in a Methods of Inquiry class (which taught students how to learn effectively). That's a class I wish I would have taken, but it wasn't available when I started.

And then of course is the old adage from Henry Kissinger, "University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small." :-)

[robin-june.livejournal.com]

Mike Stein was in that situation. His major was Philosophy, but he was learning more computing on the job than any computer class could teach at the time, so he left school. After a decade or so, his lack of a Bachelor's was preventing him from being considered for new positions, so he went back to school and finished the philosophy degree.

[athenawindsong.livejournal.com]

Non-CS related, that question seems to be more about satisfying a curiousity than about relevancy. Or, they might be in discussions with a peer-juried journal to create a study from survey answers concerning college training in the CS field. CS-related, it sounds quite relevant because of the ever-changing/developing nature of that field. CS courses in college 20 years ago seem very different from the graduation requirements of today.

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

I think you answered very well.