I went 1 term at UF and never did do a CS class there. I left because while there are a lot of appealing things about a large and complex school and I enjoyed the academics and cultural facilities, the student were entirely too grim. I could have found a friendlier crowd in Manhattan at rush hour. Of course, I was also pushing 30 at the time, which meant that by the reckoning of most students I was in the advanced stages of mummification.
Even back then, their programs struck me as a little odd, being split mostly between the engineering and business schools. They also hadn't yet discovered the C Programming Language, even though I'd been teaching it at FJC a year or so earlier. Still, my jaw dropped when I read the news about UF dismantling its CS department. I first heard of UCF at a meeting of the UF ACM chapter. Every year there's a programming contest, and UCF was considered a Force to Be Reckoned With. Later, I moved down to Orlando and transferred to UCF and found out why. While I'm not a big fan of programming contests as a measure of ability, the UCF ACM had a well-honed machine, and it routinely did well against big-league competitors like MIT and Singapore. I have a lot of respect for UCF's CS and engineering programs, even though circumstances kept me from ever graduating. UCF also established a proper research park in its vicinity. UNF tried to, but about the best they could manage was an AOL call center. Speaking of which, I'm sorry to report that I haven't exactly been inundated with volunteers on my own little pet geek project. Are we really THAT primitive around here? Anyway, regardless of the relative merits of various colleges, the brutal fact is that CS is not the best of career choices anymore. I think we've pretty much bottomed out on the offshoring thing, but that doesn't mean that Happy Days are Here Again, or likely to be so anytime soon. While it should be relatively easy to enter the field while you're still at the bottom of your earnings potential and willing to work insane hours, age discrimination and the Wal-Mart effect on salaries mean that paying off that student loan may prove difficult. Not that there are a whole lot of other professions that can offer more hope right now. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive http://marc.info/?l=jaxlug-list&r=1&w=2 RSS Feed http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/maillist.xml Unsubscribe [email protected]
