I was a CS major in college, and during my junior year I picked up an Econ degree, as the dot com bubble had burst (this was in the fall of '01). After seeing the CS ratio at around 85%-15%, I figured Econ would be somewhat better, maybe 65%-35%. Nope. The lower level classes had decent ratios, but once you got up to the banking and corporate finance classes the ratios were just as bad in CS. Having worked in both IT and finance professionally, I can tell you it's no better in the working world.
Why? Partially the culture -- I know I wouldn't want to enter a field that was considered "feminine" with 80%+ women. A lot of it is also due to the life you're forced to lead in high stress, long hour jobs. My current job is at a company with a pretty high reputation, and almost all of the women who work in the "thinking" positions are either single or married with no children. It's tough working 50+ hours a week while trying to advance if you're raising small children (while things are changing, when push comes to shove women are still the primary parent for child-rearing, even in two-income families).
My girlfriend got her degree in engineering and is using it now, but she'd eventually like to work in a non-profit/environmental capacity. I'm sure she'd do well in higher stress, longer-hour jobs if she wanted to, but that's not her desire. The women I know who have chosen that life do just as well as men do, but for some reason many talented women stay away from those jobs. Frankly, I think they've got it figured out better than we have.
I'm willing to bet some Warcraft III ladder points that the timing of bnetd being shut down was due to the Warcraft III beta. People (myself included) are using it to play the beta illegally, which maybe made them think that we'd simply use the cracked beta instead of buying the game at a later date. I still don't understand what's so bad about a few thousand extra beta testers, but hey, it's their product, they have the right to do whatever they want with it.
First, let me say that I love Google, the search engine, and everything about the way it's been structured to date. However, I can't believe that they would try to IPO in this environment.
Look around at the "successful" dot coms. Yahoo's gone from 250 to 18. Amazon (yes, I know we hate it, but it's one of the few well-recognized dot coms on the Street) from 100 to 12.5. Transmeta, which IPO'ed only a short while ago, from the 40s to 6. It's that bad out there. Unless you're AOL, a company which really isn't an internet company anymore, or eBay, the only real survivor of the dot com era, you're not going to do anything on Wall Street. If Google is truly serious about IPO'ing this year, its price will probably start in the $7-8 range, and God help it if it warns, because it'll quickly fall below $5, oblivion for publicly traded companies (look at Loudcloud and Agere which IPO'ed a couple months ago).
Online advertising alone isn't enough to cut it. Without a real business model, Google's better off as it is, a geek's delight and out of the vicious spotlight cast on tech stocks by the financial markets.
As an avid BNL fan, I found the song on napster last month about a week before it came on the radio. Before the CD came out I'd say about half of the results would be the legit one, and half would have the commentary. If you're really interested in obtaining it, alt.music.barenaked-ladies is really friendly and I'm sure people there would be willing to help you out.
I'm not arguing that it can be a good experience for students. However, it differs from co-ops in a couple keys ways.
In co-ops, I believe you take a semester off from school to work for the company, during which time you are paid for your work. This differs from our clinics, where we are not paid, and only receive credit units for implementing a solution to a problem that might be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to a company. It's one thing if you go to work for Intel and develop a faster transistor. After all, it's your job, that's what you're paid to do. It's another if you are forced to do it to graduate from college.
I'd prefer a system whereby we have the option of either doing research or participating in clinic. Of course, the school would lose out on valuable grant monies if this were the case, so I'm not holding my breath over it.
At my school, Harvey Mudd College, corporatism is even integrated into the curriculum to some extent. Seniors in some of the "classic" disciplines like chemistry or biology still do research for theses, but computer science and engineering students are required to participate in at least a year of "clinic" for graduation.
Basically, these clinics involve teams of students becoming contractors of sorts for corporations. Clinic teams are given somewhere in the neighborhood of $35,000 to complete these projects, which are funded by companies such as DirecTV, Raytheon, TRW, and of course, Microsoft.
Based on the success of the clinic experience, the school is experimenting with initiating "entepreneurial clinic" where a team of students literally receives VC funding to start a company. They receive credit for this, but in addition, the school is made a partial owner of the company.
One of the visiting professors here a couple years ago spoke out against the clinic system, saying it was turning students into corporate slaves, but the trustees got rid of him. This past year's senior class made a move to have him as the commencement speaker, but the trustees went with someone else instead.
I see no sign of the clinic system here abating, and expect it to catch on at other universities in the near future as well.
I'm seeing a lot of posts that read along the lines of, "If it weren't for Apple IIs in the classroom I would've never started programming, tinkering with machines, etc." Of course, this being slashdot, a good number of people here have their lives revolve around computers, so whenever any discussion comes about that threatens to eliminate their primary tool from any aspect of society, they feel threatened/outraged.
As a first year college student, I can say that I've been educated at both ends of the computer curve, with Apple IIs and with Pentiums. What I've noticed is that the higher and more prevalent the technology, the more it is misused. In my high school, we spent over $100K on buying the latest and greatest Dells and having them all networked, only to have them gather dust while a small group of students--those who already knew what they were doing--put them to use. When the machines were finally available to the entirety of the student body they were primarily used for game playing/web surfing, activities that obviously aren't educationally beneficial (most high school students would choose mtv.com over slashdot.org any day). At the same time, our AP classes were in need of new textbooks and our pleas went unanswered.
I'm sure that in some cases, schools have incredibly motivated and skilled teachers willing to use computers the way they were intended to be used, but in the vast majority of cases they are little more than Nintendos/TVs/phones, depriving schools of money that could be better spent on books/teachers.
The recent articles mentioning the banning of sites such as napster and now dialpad, coupled with the post about attempts to limit students' freedoms at Arizona State, are setting a disturbing trend of universities trying to dictate to their students what they can and cannot do. A common reason for the censoring is that "it's a privilege to use the network." Well, I don't buy that. Networks are ubiquitous in centers of higher education, and while attending college may be considered a privilege, using the network at such an institution, one that students pay for, certainly isn't.
If my school (Harvey Mudd) were to ever implement a policy as totalitarian as the one described at Clemson, I'd seriously consider a transfer and would tell prospective students not to come here, not just because of the lost services, but also because it shows what the administration thinks about the students. How long will it be before college guides have an IT category listing whether such-and-such school has banned napster, etc?
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I was a CS major in college, and during my junior year I picked up an Econ degree, as the dot com bubble had burst (this was in the fall of '01). After seeing the CS ratio at around 85%-15%, I figured Econ would be somewhat better, maybe 65%-35%. Nope. The lower level classes had decent ratios, but once you got up to the banking and corporate finance classes the ratios were just as bad in CS. Having worked in both IT and finance professionally, I can tell you it's no better in the working world.
Why? Partially the culture -- I know I wouldn't want to enter a field that was considered "feminine" with 80%+ women. A lot of it is also due to the life you're forced to lead in high stress, long hour jobs. My current job is at a company with a pretty high reputation, and almost all of the women who work in the "thinking" positions are either single or married with no children. It's tough working 50+ hours a week while trying to advance if you're raising small children (while things are changing, when push comes to shove women are still the primary parent for child-rearing, even in two-income families).
My girlfriend got her degree in engineering and is using it now, but she'd eventually like to work in a non-profit/environmental capacity. I'm sure she'd do well in higher stress, longer-hour jobs if she wanted to, but that's not her desire. The women I know who have chosen that life do just as well as men do, but for some reason many talented women stay away from those jobs. Frankly, I think they've got it figured out better than we have.
I'm willing to bet some Warcraft III ladder points that the timing of bnetd being shut down was due to the Warcraft III beta. People (myself included) are using it to play the beta illegally, which maybe made them think that we'd simply use the cracked beta instead of buying the game at a later date. I still don't understand what's so bad about a few thousand extra beta testers, but hey, it's their product, they have the right to do whatever they want with it.
First, let me say that I love Google, the search engine, and everything about the way it's been structured to date. However, I can't believe that they would try to IPO in this environment.
Look around at the "successful" dot coms. Yahoo's gone from 250 to 18. Amazon (yes, I know we hate it, but it's one of the few well-recognized dot coms on the Street) from 100 to 12.5. Transmeta, which IPO'ed only a short while ago, from the 40s to 6. It's that bad out there. Unless you're AOL, a company which really isn't an internet company anymore, or eBay, the only real survivor of the dot com era, you're not going to do anything on Wall Street. If Google is truly serious about IPO'ing this year, its price will probably start in the $7-8 range, and God help it if it warns, because it'll quickly fall below $5, oblivion for publicly traded companies (look at Loudcloud and Agere which IPO'ed a couple months ago).
Online advertising alone isn't enough to cut it. Without a real business model, Google's better off as it is, a geek's delight and out of the vicious spotlight cast on tech stocks by the financial markets.
As an avid BNL fan, I found the song on napster last month about a week before it came on the radio. Before the CD came out I'd say about half of the results would be the legit one, and half would have the commentary. If you're really interested in obtaining it, alt.music.barenaked-ladies is really friendly and I'm sure people there would be willing to help you out.
I'm not arguing that it can be a good experience for students. However, it differs from co-ops in a couple keys ways.
In co-ops, I believe you take a semester off from school to work for the company, during which time you are paid for your work. This differs from our clinics, where we are not paid, and only receive credit units for implementing a solution to a problem that might be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to a company. It's one thing if you go to work for Intel and develop a faster transistor. After all, it's your job, that's what you're paid to do. It's another if you are forced to do it to graduate from college.
I'd prefer a system whereby we have the option of either doing research or participating in clinic. Of course, the school would lose out on valuable grant monies if this were the case, so I'm not holding my breath over it.
At my school, Harvey Mudd College, corporatism is even integrated into the curriculum to some extent. Seniors in some of the "classic" disciplines like chemistry or biology still do research for theses, but computer science and engineering students are required to participate in at least a year of "clinic" for graduation.
Basically, these clinics involve teams of students becoming contractors of sorts for corporations. Clinic teams are given somewhere in the neighborhood of $35,000 to complete these projects, which are funded by companies such as DirecTV, Raytheon, TRW, and of course, Microsoft.
Based on the success of the clinic experience, the school is experimenting with initiating "entepreneurial clinic" where a team of students literally receives VC funding to start a company. They receive credit for this, but in addition, the school is made a partial owner of the company.
One of the visiting professors here a couple years ago spoke out against the clinic system, saying it was turning students into corporate slaves, but the trustees got rid of him. This past year's senior class made a move to have him as the commencement speaker, but the trustees went with someone else instead.
I see no sign of the clinic system here abating, and expect it to catch on at other universities in the near future as well.
I'm seeing a lot of posts that read along the lines of, "If it weren't for Apple IIs in the classroom I would've never started programming, tinkering with machines, etc." Of course, this being slashdot, a good number of people here have their lives revolve around computers, so whenever any discussion comes about that threatens to eliminate their primary tool from any aspect of society, they feel threatened/outraged.
As a first year college student, I can say that I've been educated at both ends of the computer curve, with Apple IIs and with Pentiums. What I've noticed is that the higher and more prevalent the technology, the more it is misused. In my high school, we spent over $100K on buying the latest and greatest Dells and having them all networked, only to have them gather dust while a small group of students--those who already knew what they were doing--put them to use. When the machines were finally available to the entirety of the student body they were primarily used for game playing/web surfing, activities that obviously aren't educationally beneficial (most high school students would choose mtv.com over slashdot.org any day). At the same time, our AP classes were in need of new textbooks and our pleas went unanswered.
I'm sure that in some cases, schools have incredibly motivated and skilled teachers willing to use computers the way they were intended to be used, but in the vast majority of cases they are little more than Nintendos/TVs/phones, depriving schools of money that could be better spent on books/teachers.
The recent articles mentioning the banning of sites such as napster and now dialpad, coupled with the post about attempts to limit students' freedoms at Arizona State, are setting a disturbing trend of universities trying to dictate to their students what they can and cannot do. A common reason for the censoring is that "it's a privilege to use the network." Well, I don't buy that. Networks are ubiquitous in centers of higher education, and while attending college may be considered a privilege, using the network at such an institution, one that students pay for, certainly isn't.
If my school (Harvey Mudd) were to ever implement a policy as totalitarian as the one described at Clemson, I'd seriously consider a transfer and would tell prospective students not to come here, not just because of the lost services, but also because it shows what the administration thinks about the students. How long will it be before college guides have an IT category listing whether such-and-such school has banned napster, etc?