Northface highly emphasizes teamwork and collaboration. In the first two quarters, students take two collaboration courses. We also spend vast amounts of time working in teams (no projects are done as individuals). IBM loves Northface so much because the school does teach collaboration with such heavy emphasis. One of their beefs with the traditional universities is the lack of graduates' abilities to work in groups.
I struggled for four years at a Fortune 500 company after my first degree from a state university because my collaboration skills stunk (they never taught them). In 2 1/2 quarters at NU, I've learned why it was so hard for me to collaborate and now work with other CS majors regularly and harmoniously.
Part of NU's coursework also teachs self-teaching. A major part of being a developer (and keeping your job) is being able to adapt and learn. We aren't spoon fed at NU. Much of what we do at NU, we have to figure out with the resources available to us--the same resources we'll have in the real world. When we graduate, we'll have the skills to learn whatever language an employer wants us to and be able to model whatever real-world application a customer wants.
That's okay if you don't hire me. I've got my sites set on Big Blue (IBM), Fidelity, Wells Fargo, and a number of other Fortune 100 companies. They're just waiting for me to graduate from NU.
You'd probably like student living here at Northface, then. We get students from all over the country. Those who move here to attend usually live in the managed apartments near campus. To those students, it's not much different from living in dorms and they really enjoy the friendships they make with their flat mates.
Yes, I too was tripped up by the name at first. There's actually a story behind the name. I heard it shortly after starting school at NU. The northface is representative of our journey. It is said that the northface of the mountain is the more difficult, challenging, and rewarding (not being a mountain climber, I can't really say). So, too, is NU.
I agree. I have a BA in Graphic Design from a state university. Took me 4 1/2 years (9 semesters) simply because I changed majors right after my freshman year. Northface is different.
You might be interested to hear that all of the senior professors here at Northface came to school because they, too, are fed up with the traditional system. It just isn't changing fast enough to keep up with this industry. They saw a chance at NU to start from scratch and set things up the way they should be for today's CS degree needs. (And they left some pretty nice non-teaching jobs to do so, too.)
I absolutely agree! Certifications only make programmres. And that totally figured in to my research when I chose Northface University. This school is not simply a certification program. (Who in their right mind would pay $60,000 for two certifications!?)
How many programmers do you know that can also interface with the business people? At NU, we're not just tought to code and pass the certs. Collaboration is a hefty focus (few traditional universities teach CS students collaboration) and modelling is core to our education.
"When the Northface founders showed us what they were trying to accomplish, it just made sense. The Northface vision falls in line with IBM's quest to maintain a highly skilled workforce so we can continue to develop innovative products for our customers."
Grady Booch is now on NU's advisory board. Another industry leader, Oma Sewhdat (who has held long-time positions such as: IBM Software Group's Senior Manager of WebSphere; and, jCert Initiative President) left IBM to come to NU. His goal: make sure NU lives up to the educational goals he helped research and establish at IBM over the past ten years.
Northface University will give the CS education it's students need.
Okay, but you failed to say how much time you spend in class. Most of our afternoons are spent in labs which reduces the amount of homework. What would you say is the total time per week you spend doing school work?
Northface often combines what would normally be many courses at a 4-year school into one course. For example, last quarter my CS class was 17 credits and was taught by four different instructors throughout the course of a day. Keep in mind that the school is still required to have a certain amount of classroom lecture and/or lab time per credit awarded.
I hear of very few students here (at Northface) who spend their nights and weekends partying. The average age is around 25 and many of us already have other degrees. The school recognizes our maturity, too, and adjusted the original schedule of 8a-5p to 8a-4p so we could work after school.
I'm actually a bit concerned that we're going to loose a bunch of students after next quarter because we will have covered most of C# and will be ready to take the MCSD. I'm concerned some students will take off because they feel they only need to know C# and can get just as good a job with it as they could with it and Java. They forget the importance of modelling and a well-rounded education.
Northface University is NOT just a tech school. We study gen-ed courses just like everyone else. Only difference in the gen-ed courses is that they are cover topics related to CS. For example, our history class will be the history of computing and our speech and writing classes allowed us to talk about computer stuff. (Besides, what else would a nerd want to talk about!?;-)
We are in classes for 35 hours each week and have an average of 9 hours of homework each week (the homework time varies greatly depending on your learning ability and previous experience). It's equivelant to a full-time job and then some!
We don't just study programming, either! A lot of time has been spent studying modelling--UML and ORM.
We wish we had some way of showing some of the awesome projects we've created in the first 2 1/2 quarters (15 weeks of class). Faculty at NU have been showing the projects to the high-ups at the school's partners (VP's at IBM, Microsoft, Oracle) and they have been impressed. One client stated his amazement at how one project team had taken a project that they didn't know was considered near impossible and made it work in eight weeks. We're no slackers, for sure!
Northface University is fully accredited by the ACICS (http://www.acics.org/)--the same accreditation body governing the Art Institute of New York City, the Schiller International Universities in Europe, Potomac College in D.C., and many others.
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Northface highly emphasizes teamwork and collaboration. In the first two quarters, students take two collaboration courses. We also spend vast amounts of time working in teams (no projects are done as individuals). IBM loves Northface so much because the school does teach collaboration with such heavy emphasis. One of their beefs with the traditional universities is the lack of graduates' abilities to work in groups.
I struggled for four years at a Fortune 500 company after my first degree from a state university because my collaboration skills stunk (they never taught them). In 2 1/2 quarters at NU, I've learned why it was so hard for me to collaborate and now work with other CS majors regularly and harmoniously.
Part of NU's coursework also teachs self-teaching. A major part of being a developer (and keeping your job) is being able to adapt and learn. We aren't spoon fed at NU. Much of what we do at NU, we have to figure out with the resources available to us--the same resources we'll have in the real world. When we graduate, we'll have the skills to learn whatever language an employer wants us to and be able to model whatever real-world application a customer wants.
That's okay if you don't hire me. I've got my sites set on Big Blue (IBM), Fidelity, Wells Fargo, and a number of other Fortune 100 companies. They're just waiting for me to graduate from NU.
You'd probably like student living here at Northface, then. We get students from all over the country. Those who move here to attend usually live in the managed apartments near campus. To those students, it's not much different from living in dorms and they really enjoy the friendships they make with their flat mates.
Yes, I too was tripped up by the name at first. There's actually a story behind the name. I heard it shortly after starting school at NU. The northface is representative of our journey. It is said that the northface of the mountain is the more difficult, challenging, and rewarding (not being a mountain climber, I can't really say). So, too, is NU.
I agree. I have a BA in Graphic Design from a state university. Took me 4 1/2 years (9 semesters) simply because I changed majors right after my freshman year. Northface is different.
You might be interested to hear that all of the senior professors here at Northface came to school because they, too, are fed up with the traditional system. It just isn't changing fast enough to keep up with this industry. They saw a chance at NU to start from scratch and set things up the way they should be for today's CS degree needs. (And they left some pretty nice non-teaching jobs to do so, too.)
I absolutely agree! Certifications only make programmres. And that totally figured in to my research when I chose Northface University. This school is not simply a certification program. (Who in their right mind would pay $60,000 for two certifications!?)
How many programmers do you know that can also interface with the business people? At NU, we're not just tought to code and pass the certs. Collaboration is a hefty focus (few traditional universities teach CS students collaboration) and modelling is core to our education.
IBM Fellow Grady Booch (see bio at http://www-306.ibm.com/software/rational/bios/booc h.html) was quoted in a recent Salt Lake Tribune article (http://www.sltrib.com/business/ci_2383658) as saying this about NU:
Grady Booch is now on NU's advisory board. Another industry leader, Oma Sewhdat (who has held long-time positions such as: IBM Software Group's Senior Manager of WebSphere; and, jCert Initiative President) left IBM to come to NU. His goal: make sure NU lives up to the educational goals he helped research and establish at IBM over the past ten years.
Northface University will give the CS education it's students need.
Okay, but you failed to say how much time you spend in class. Most of our afternoons are spent in labs which reduces the amount of homework. What would you say is the total time per week you spend doing school work?
Northface often combines what would normally be many courses at a 4-year school into one course. For example, last quarter my CS class was 17 credits and was taught by four different instructors throughout the course of a day. Keep in mind that the school is still required to have a certain amount of classroom lecture and/or lab time per credit awarded.
I hear of very few students here (at Northface) who spend their nights and weekends partying. The average age is around 25 and many of us already have other degrees. The school recognizes our maturity, too, and adjusted the original schedule of 8a-5p to 8a-4p so we could work after school.
I'm actually a bit concerned that we're going to loose a bunch of students after next quarter because we will have covered most of C# and will be ready to take the MCSD. I'm concerned some students will take off because they feel they only need to know C# and can get just as good a job with it as they could with it and Java. They forget the importance of modelling and a well-rounded education.
Yes, exactly! We don't waste time studying ancient programming languages or how to write a compiller. Deffinitely half the fluff.
Northface University is NOT just a tech school. We study gen-ed courses just like everyone else. Only difference in the gen-ed courses is that they are cover topics related to CS. For example, our history class will be the history of computing and our speech and writing classes allowed us to talk about computer stuff. (Besides, what else would a nerd want to talk about!? ;-)
We are in classes for 35 hours each week and have an average of 9 hours of homework each week (the homework time varies greatly depending on your learning ability and previous experience). It's equivelant to a full-time job and then some!
We don't just study programming, either! A lot of time has been spent studying modelling--UML and ORM.
We wish we had some way of showing some of the awesome projects we've created in the first 2 1/2 quarters (15 weeks of class). Faculty at NU have been showing the projects to the high-ups at the school's partners (VP's at IBM, Microsoft, Oracle) and they have been impressed. One client stated his amazement at how one project team had taken a project that they didn't know was considered near impossible and made it work in eight weeks. We're no slackers, for sure!
Northface University is fully accredited by the ACICS (http://www.acics.org/)--the same accreditation body governing the Art Institute of New York City, the Schiller International Universities in Europe, Potomac College in D.C., and many others.