Pros and cons of a CIS/MIS major?

College Majors Engineering Majors
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<p>You’re not looking to go into robotics, if you can’t be bothered with math. You’ll need a bend for statistics and optionally physics (mechanics, electronics, servos etc.) as well. For AI it would also be math and statistics.</p>

<p>Computer science is a fairly stump major without the conceptual insight that comes from mathematics and statistics. Sure there are many subfields as well as jobs where you can manage with just formal logic and with knowledge of the system or the used software libraries, but for anything that includes graphics/geometry, data analysis, complex or novel data structures, complex or novel algorithms, signal processing, simulation or control of physical things, you’ll need math.</p>

<p>You don’t need to do a degree in programming, programming is easy, algorithms aren’t.</p>

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<p>@reactor</p>

<p>Who was your post directed at?</p>

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<p>@Jnelsonmarka</p>

<p>Sorry for not being specific. The post is aimed at everyone who thinks math is not relevant to CS. It’s very important (depending of course what you specialize in). If you’re interested in what kind of math is and can be involved in “basic programming”, you may want to have a look at the book The Art of Computer Programming by Donald Knuth or the research done by Edsger W. Dijkstra.</p>

<p>As for the thread’s topic:</p>

<p>CIS/MIS is about organizational and business information technology. I.e. it’s about the large scale and high level study of how to develop and manage organizational IT infrastructures (what technologies to use, why are they used, how they can be integrated into a system that serves the organizational needs, how do you manage costs and maintenance, what technology providers to use etc.).</p>

<p>@Jnelsonmarka</p>

<p>You mention “information science”. Without knowing the curriculum specifically, it sounds like it could be the same as CS. “Information science” is, in a way, a more appropriate name for the study anyways (because “Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.”).</p>

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<p>You could write business applications with a CIS degree like accounts payable or general ledger but you’d have a hard time writing pieces of an operating system or database management system efficiently or at all.</p>

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<p>@BCEagle91</p>

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<p>Depends entirely on what one’s been studying/doing though. Many veteran computer programmers agree that a degree is not what makes a good programmer. Programming is best learned by programming and by studying code and practices in the areas that interest you. If you want to write operating systems, study Linux. If you want to write compilers, study compilers. The course that one takes serves as an introduction to many areas of interest, but it will not make one a knowledgeable computer programmer, it’s learned by doing and by learning from others who are more knowledgeable than you (and their mistakes).</p>

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<p>If you don’t have the math, doing work in an area that requires the math may very well be impossible. At best, you’ll be annoying the rest of the people in your group as they have to explain basics to you.</p>

<p>I have a CIS degree and worked in business programming. I then worked in an engineering group. There was a lot that I didn’t understand in meetings because I didn’t have the theory down. Then I picked up an MSCS and everything made sense.</p>

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<p>Just to piggyback on the topic of taking minimum math for the computer industry…</p>

<p>Applications of graph theory in Computer Science:</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.cs.xu.edu/csci390/12s/IJEST10-02-09-124.pdf‎[/url]”>www.cs.xu.edu/csci390/12s/IJEST10-02-09-124.pdf‎</a></p>

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<p>Time to offer some of the combined 55 years of CS/IT experience of the Turbo’s :)</p>

<p>CS and its associated heavy duty math is more useful for problem solving type situations. The more ‘hard’ classes you take the better your brain gets in solving problems, much like math (LOLZ). That is, if you don’t know the answer and have time to waste you can generally figure it out on your own.</p>

<p>MIS/IT type training is more useful in situations where specific knowledge is needed about a very specific technology that does a business function. That’s more like SAP, Oracle, and the like. </p>

<p>Now, you can pick up a book and figure out IT/MIS things on your own, especially if you have some background in the more theoretical parts of, say, database design, normalization, etc. And there’s good theory behind some of the stuff in IT. In the 80’s Cajun State U. did some very interesting research in the area of Dataflow Programming Language and there was hardly a grad student that did not experience first hand the wrath of a couple of profs who were developing one. Fast forward 30 years and the Informatica ETL Mrs. Turbo toils with daily is a nicely drawn dataflow programming language, nothing less.</p>

<p>Likewise, one can waste a PhD degree or two on database query optimization or whether this join or that join makes sense. Those are mainstay questions that any MIS/IT shop deals with.</p>

<p>The bottom line is that a well trained CS person (whether BA CS math lite or BS CS heavy duty math) can learn to do IT/MIS type work, tho it is often not as interesting as ‘real’ CS work. The opposite is not necessarily true, an IT/MIS type graduate may be good in the ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ skills popular in any IT shop (Visual Basic 6 or PowerBuilder anyone?) but their classes are not the ‘problem solving’ variety, more the managing part, networking, data administration, etc.</p>

<p>It really depends on the program of course. And, it is not that the junior or senior level OS or Prog Lang classes will get you to write the next Python; it’s that they force you to think outside your comfort zone (Visual Studio or Eclipse or what not). That’s where the difference really is.</p>

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<p>I agree with turbo.</p>

<p>That being said, there were several IS majors that I graduated with that went on to become developers.</p>

<p>I took the first class on c++, a course on Web programming (php and mySQL), a course on hardware and software architecture where we had to learn assembly language… And that was it as far as programming goes. There were a few other programming courses that those interested in engineering or development could take as well. It all depends on your program.</p>

<p>I currently use my IS degree for tech support, system admin, auditing, dr, service mgmt, release deployments, change mgmt, project mgmt, etc. pretty much a little bit of everything. I might be designing a database for my team one day to track our stuff, fixing a java script issue another day, and configuring a brand new application the next day. I may be part of a project team designing new functionality for a system or figuring out how to roll something out. The next week I might be in class with oracle learning stuff about developing for our applications. </p>

<p>I have to understand not only how our specific systems work but which systems interact with each other and what makes each thing tick. So I need an understanding of development, requirements gathering, business analysis, databases, networking, testing, etc. pretty much a little bit of everything.</p>

<p>I think my position symbolizes my degree. That’s just my opinion. That’s not to say someone with a different degree or no degree couldn’t do it. But you may get into what BC mentioned with having to explain a lot of basics.</p>

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<p>@reactor</p>

<p>You’re wrong, I do know the curriculum specifically and I will send you a link to that curriculum under this post. The curriculum for information science looks very similar to the one for computer science just without all the math and physics. Check it out and tell me what you think.</p>

<p>Click this link…</p>

<p>[UNF</a> Search](<a href=“UNF Search”>UNF Search)</p>

<p>Then click on the the page that says, “INFORMATION SYSTEMS/SCIENCE TRACK Spring 2013 Schedule”. From that point open the document that it offers in adobe and look at the two tracks it offers: it has information science and information systems. Look at the right column for information science and tell me what you think.</p>

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I have been trying to say this in a few paragraphs. Nice way of putting it together in a sentence</p>

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<p>@lightnin</p>

<p>So then if I could do programming without a b.s. in information science how would I go about doing that? By getting certifications? And if so, which ones and how would I go about getting them without schooling?</p>

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<p>The degree is needed when you go for the first few jobs. Once past that point it will likely not make a big difference.</p>

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<p>You don’t need certifications for programming.</p>

<p>You just need to be a good programmer. A friend of mine dropped out of school to take a programming gig and has worked his way up to game developer for EA without ever finishing his degree. Makes many bucks more then me too. Sometimes I wish I went into that field.</p>

<p>That being said, he dropped out and got that first job fifteen years ago. It’s a lot more competitive these days so you should have a degree.</p>

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<p>Okay well still, where would I learn this stuff without a degree then? Also, I was only mentioning the certifications because I know a common misconception about IT is that most people think that it’s the Bachelor’s that get’s you the certification, but in reality it’s the certifications. I just wasn’t sure if programming was like IT at all.</p>

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<p>IT can include programming but it can be more operations too.</p>

<p>My daughter is going to enroll in a BSIT program this fall. She just finished here ASCS. She is going through two A+ certification books and I’m teaching her a variety of areas such as PC hardware, applications (MS Office, Virtual Machines, Imaging, Database, Remote Desktop, etc.) from a management perspective. I would also like to do some Android programming with her. The courses in her program range from programming to operations - but they are light on math and theory. One semester of discrete structures is required and I think that will be a fair amount of work for her.</p>

<p>If you look at indeed.com or craigslist jobs, you’ll see a wide variety of jobs under IT. From Cloud management to database administration to network administration to security administration to imaging new computers to answering Excel questions to managing Linux and Mac OS X server systems and all over the place. The jobs typically pay from $40K to $160K.</p>

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<p>I learned a lot of programming in high-school. Our high-school had programming classes and I took my first one in middle-school. The self-taught thing works reasonably well for a lot of applications - there are lots of teenagers that write useful applications or programs - but it helps to have some business knowledge if you are going to work on business applications and it helps to have some math and theory if you’re going to work on applications which require efficiency or algorithms that have a lot of math behind them.</p>

<p>If you have a university nearby, see if their library is open to the public and go to the section on self-help and tutorial books for computer applications. Just browse through them and you can get an idea as to how you could teach yourself programming or operations. You may be able to do this at a local Barnes and Noble too - I haven’t been inside one in a long time so I don’t know if they still do this. There used to be many programmers that would buy books from B&N, read through them and then return them within the return window. A lot of development and application books are available online now through a program called Safari. Many schools with CS/IT programs have subscriptions where students have access to a huge library of technical books. You can just read them on your PC.</p>

<p>It helps to have access to some hardware to do these things. It also helps to have a friend or several friends that are hardware/OS/network/applications-saavy. The online gaming world can be a good resource for getting help in these areas - sometimes.</p>

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<p>Well what I’m probably going to wind up doing is just doing an information science degree and then later going back and taking a few more classes to complete a second degree in Comp Sci. It’s not worth it for me to just get a CS degree right off the bat just so I can get a software ENG job because there seem to be VERY few of those companies in my town. I called around everywhere today and it looks like the majority of the computer jobs here are IT based, but they still said they’d hire me though with an IS degree so that’s good.</p>