A calling to computer science

Posted on Nov 04, 2011 Recommend Twitter

In both IT and communication design, graduates are ready to solve problems

By Joan Weiner

Leigh Anne Warner came to CSU Monterey Bay knowing exactly what she wanted to study.

“I was on the robotics team at Carmel High,” said the sophomore computer science major, “and I really liked programming the robots.”

Her decision to focus on software engineering was an easy one. Warner is part of a trend at CSUMB and nationwide. Enrollment in computer science programs is rising after a decade of declining numbers brought on by the end of the dot-com bubble. That may be due, at least in part, to celebrity entrepreneurs such as Mark Zuckerberg and the late Steve Jobs, whose social networking products students use every day.

See the ITCD program at a glance.

Whatever their inspiration, students have several options for learning about computers at CSUMB. 

The School of Information Technology and Communication Design (ITCD) offers bachelor’s degrees in computer science and in communication design. Students take several core courses and then choose a concentration which appeals to them.

For computer science students, software engineering is the most popular concentration. Among design students, web design tops the list.

Read more about the way the Communication Design major blends visuals and technology.

Students in both programs learn how to solve real-world problems and do it in a socially responsible way. They also learn to communicate and collaborate, because most class projects are done in groups. These skills make them very much in demand.

“We have more employers calling to find interns than we have students to send them,” said Dr. Eric Tao said, director of the university’s School of Information Technology and Communication Design. 

In one real-world example, ITCD faculty member Dr. Bude Su and a team of students and alumni worked with Natividad Medical Center to develop online modules for staff training.

The hospital was faced with the challenge of training 700 nurses and physician assistants to use an electronic patient charting system that replaces paper charts. Traditional training methods would have required 24 hours per employee, taken several months and cost more than $1 million. For
the county-run hospital in Salinas, that investment of both time and money was too high. 

But the online training system, with assessment built in, shortened the training to half a day and also provided the staff with anywhere, anytime access.

“It would have cost the hospital three to five times more to get this work done somewhere else,” Dr. Su said. “And we believe our quality is better than what we’ve seen.”

With the combination of technology and media, ITCD has a lot to offer the local medical community, Dr. Tao said. That’s in addition to the nursing program the university is scheduled to start next summer.

“We can handle projects involving electronic medical records,”he said. “And we can work with large sets of medical records to do data mining. That reveals things that wouldn’t be obvious from paper records.”

For CSUMB students, the opportunity to apply what they’re learning in real-life settings extends beyond the medical realm. Along with their counterparts at Monterey Peninsula, Hartnell and Cabrillo colleges, they have the opportunity to intern with industry and government agencies organized by MBRACE – the Monterey Bay Regional Academy of Computing Education.

MBRACE is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation. It aims to attract a diverse group of students to the field of computer science and give them hands-on experience working in professional settings.

High-level internships

“The goal is to strengthen the pathway from high school to community college to CSUMB to the workplace,” said Dr. Sathya Narayanan, director of the undergraduate computer science program. “We’re trying to grow a community around computer science.”

Planning is underway to house ITCD in a new academic building. Learn more.

Fourteen students were placed in internships through MBRACE last summer – with the Naval Postgraduate School; Cisco Systems; Cruzio, a Santa Cruz-based Internet provider; and the city of Watsonville. 

Warner was one of them. At NPS, she worked in the Center for Network Innovation and Experimentation, helping to develop an Android application.

“It was a fantastic opportunity to learn about networking in a lab environment and to gain experience in software development,” she said. “We are paired up with a partner for doing homework and projects. It’s useful – that’s the way programming is done.” 

As Warner looks ahead to graduation, she said she’s considering seeking work in Silicon Valley, adding, “My dream job is working for Google or Apple.” 

David Huey, a senior from Los Angeles, also spent his summer at NPS in the virtualization and cloud computing lab. He worked on a project that would allow the Monterey County Emergency Operations Center to function if a disaster knocked out power.

Huey remembers being interested in computers at a young age and came to CSUMB to pursue that interest.

“Computer science isn’t taught so narrowly here,” he said. “They aren’t training us for a job; they’re training us for a career.”

That was part of the theory behind an academic concentration in computer game development that was added to the ITCD curriculum this semester.

“For those under 30, games are their primary form of entertainment,” Dr. Tao said. “There is a demand for computer scientists who choose to concentrate on games.”

He’s quick to add that students work on “serious” games, not just ones intended for entertainment. 

“We push our students to design games that have some tangible benefit to the player, rather than to kill something,” Dr. Tao said.

While computer science enrollment has increased, demand for graduates’ skills is projected to remain high. Federal statistics indicate that IT jobs will grow at double the overall job rate in the next decade.

“Computer science education relates directly to issues of innovation and competitiveness,” said Dr. Kate Lockwood, an assistant professor in ITCD. “Students proficient in computer science can expect strong demand for their skills in well-paying jobs when they graduate.”

And CSU Monterey Bay is a good place to prepare for those opportunities. 

“There are a lot of options open to us here,” Huey said. “We’re able to adapt to changes.”