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Computer Science or Info Tech?
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?"
So which do you prefer being - A system admin (follow IT) or a programmer (follow CS). They are not mutually exclusive. As a system admin I do a lot of programming. My boss in my last job favorite question was - "How can we automate this?". I like being a system admin myself - I get out of the cubicle more that way.
:^P
p.s. first post and actually fairly on topic
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
My work here is dung.
You'll probably be more locked into programming with the CS route and the IT option will let you get into programming while also being more open in the future for project management, design, and planning. I personally think the IT degree would be more geared towards the higher level exec and may be easier to make bigger bucks in the long term, and possibly short term, if that's one of your factors. Find out if the IT program prepares you for the PMP or any other major cert, which could be very useful to you in the future.
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
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.
What you may want is a Software Engineering degree. I went into Computer Science since my university didn't offer SWE, and occasionally I took a CIS/IT course. What I noticed was that the students were typically very low quality students and had little interest beyond what was right in front of them for the assignment. The course material was also very superficial, even where we had overlaps. Our CS networking classes could actually train you to be an entry-level admin. Not at all true of the IT program. Programming? Our freshman entered CS with almost as many credits as their seniors graduated with.
You can focus on whatever you want in CS, so take it if you like IT work. It'll pay a lot more than an IT degree and carry more weight when you switch jobs.
For most people qualifications only serve to prove a minimum standard of competence. Yes, a degree is both necessary and a good choice - it helps develop your skills, and also makes you eligible for jobs where someone has made a degree a check box requirement - but other than getting past the first round it makes little difference to the prospect of being hired.
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.
Think of the Children; Sleep with your Sister
I started out in CompSci for 2 years, and then switched to (and graduated) MIS. Trust me, the finance/accounting/management courses you have to take with MIS are much more valuable than physics and calculus. MIS will get you a variety of jobs, CompSci pretty much sticks you with programming.
//TODO: Insert catchy phrase
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.
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...
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If you want to work for the industry (Intel, Microsoft, Cisco), you'd want CS. If you would rather be a a programmer or admin in the CS department of a non-industry company, than IS would likely be more useful.
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 developers, I would say that 85-90% of them have a degree in one of those three fields. Information technology degrees are highly uncommon.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
Is it just me or does this question (or a variant thereof) seem to appear at least every couple months?
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
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.
OK I know the above is flamebait, and is bad because it obscures a true issue. Namely, that I teach senior IT majors at a decent engineering university and often they don't know how to do even some of thesimplest stuff I would expect, even for windows users. They are often confused about what bits and bytes are, and when I asked them some basic operating system things they were pretty confused (like the fact that the operating systems allocates memory). If I ask them to write a 10 line C++ or Java program they moan. I actually think some of them may have been computer phobic, as crazy as that sounds.
Consider Software Engineering if you like to write programs. Computer Science if you like to discover new algorithms. And IT if you like to golf and sit in the corporate box seats of your Fortune 2000 companies' vendors.
Lots of Idiotic Serparated Parenthesis.
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That's because many IT majors I have encountered went into IT because they wanted to be business majors, but didn't want to do as much with accounting or finance. On top of that, many go into IT because they think it can make them a lot of money "working with computers" (ha!) and computer science looked "too geeky".
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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 understand fundamental UNIX concepts like awk and sed; they find vi confusing; and they can't fathom how pipes work. These are the same ilk who write shell scripts that look like they were written using some poorly-written DOS
It makes me wonder: how do these people even get these jobs?
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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.
Browsers shouldn't have a back button!! It's all about going forward...
There is a significant difference in the content and structure of the courses arising from this. A US degree intends to provide a general education focussing in a specific area. A UK degree aims to provide a specialised education. In the US, a student is offered a place at a university (typically sponsored by a specific department) and can graduate with any degree they meet the requirements for. In the UK, a candidate is offered a place on a specific course. It's often possible to transfer to other courses taught by the same department (between masters and bachelors degrees, for example, since these often have the first year or two in common), but it is generally very hard to transfer between unrelated degrees (it basically involves dropping out and starting again).
With this clarified, I'd offer the following advice:
An IT degree is likely to be a vocational course, while a CompSci degree will be an academic degree. This doesn't always hold, however. A CompSci degree from a former polytechnic is likely to be a more vocational course trying to pretend it's CompSci, and is also likely to be less valuable than a real vocational course from the same university. If you want a vocational qualification, then go for IT, but get it from a university with a good reputation for vocational degrees; irrespective of what you do, a good vocational degree is likely to be more valuable than a poor academic one. Generally academic degrees give you more flexibility, while vocational ones will give you an advantage getting your first job in the field. If you are completely sure you want to be a programmer, then you should probably look for a Software Engineering degree, rather than IT. If you want a more SysAdmin type job then go for IT. If you aren't completely sure what you want (and, remember, you have to be sure you won't change your mind in three years), then go for CompSci, and keep your options more open.
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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 imagine. The life expectancy is more than 80 years these days, and you have no idea what mutations your life will undergo in that amount of time. Certainly, whatever path you pick for the time being, it'd be best to work your ass off and try to excel. You should work at it as though it might be your permanent path, but it may not be.
I've taken a bit of a strange path myself. I've been fixing computers for money since I was 10 and holding down IT jobs since I was 16. I started out a Computer Science major, hated it, and switched over to being a Philosophy major (of all things) with a minor in Literature. After college, I had a brief stint as a professional writer of sorts, hated it, and went back to fixing computers. In the years since, I've worked my way up from being a helpdesk tech to being an executive.
Honestly, I don't think the most important thing you learn in college is the subject matter of your particular major. The *most* important thing is learning how to work and to think in some way that works for you. You have to learn to juggle a lot of work, how to deal with people, and how to communicate your ideas. You learn how to make friends and how to cope with unexpected situations.
Even with subject matters as technical as computer science and information technology, the direct applicability of what you've been taught in classes will be limited. In real life situations, real life experience will serve you well. In my years of working in IT, looking at formal education and certifications never seemed to be a good sign of whether that person would be able to fix problems or to keep things running well. Surprisingly, I've found my philosophy studies have helped me get jobs and helped me do well in the industry.
I'm weary of giving advice and I'm certainly not advising that people take up philosophy as a means to getting a computer job. I guess I'm just saying that your life probably won't take a straight line, and you'll just have to find your own path. There is no "right answer".
Double major.
The above is a little inflammatory, but essentially correct. There is no job you could get as a IT major that you could not get as a CS major. There are many, many jobs you could get as a CS major that you would _not_ get as an IT major. Additionally, you may find yourself _interested_ in the science-y aspects of CS, and perhaps even go on to graduate school -- an avenue which would not only be blocked off as an IT major, but of whose existence you would not even be aware.
Choose scientist over technician.
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I've got... uhm... 19 years working in the industry by now, and I've been both a lead programmer and an IT director, so I say all of this with some assurance:
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.
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.
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I graduated from school 6 years ago, and don't remember any of the details from my studies... however, the process (math heavy) of CS remains valuable. The MBA I picked up later rounded out my skill set, but if I had taken an accounting course or two plus a general management course or two, I could have saved the time and cash and gotten it later.
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.
My background: I am a student at the University of Oklahoma. I have recently graduated with a bachelors in Computer Engineering, am about to graduate with a master's in Electrical and Computer Engineering, and am set to attend the MBA program in the fall.
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.
In regards to the statement, "which enables you to learn almost any language in a day"
Seems the CS course didn't teach you enough about anything to know that NO modern language can be learned in one day by ANYBODY.
The REAL computer specialists know just how much they DON'T know and hit the books to learn.
If some CS guy came to me for a job and had no experience and said he could learn VB or SQL in one day, I only hope he wouldn't hit his ass on the door too hard on the way out.
So that's where I went wrong...I love golf...I'm such an idiot...stupid CS degree.
They lie through their teeth.
next question.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
"you don't need a CS/IT degree to work in the field"
Right, but non-degrees are going to be paid 10-20k less than degreed people. Employers love non-degreed, skilled people.