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Advice for students starting at Wake this fall

DCDeac said:
Right - you need to hone in on something specific that has a place in the US job market. If you're headed into computer science right now for example, becoming a great coder and heading out into the world to be a developer puts you right smack in competition with the 2 million guys from India who will do the same (or better) work for half of the salary you'd want. But if you just become proficient in coding, then dedicate your last year or two towards focusing on something like DevOps, or scalable architecture, or open stack solutions, or Agile project management - nobody's going to care what your grades were. There's still a huge demand for skilled, intelligent college grads across most career paths - but structured education tends to teach what was valuable 5 years ago and it won't distinguish you enough. Then you're forced into grad school early, you tack on more debt, etc. And I think grad school in general is far more rewarding and useful when you've already been in the real world for a while.
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Doesn't becoming a great coder kind of imply learning how to build scalable architecture and or working with open stack solutions? You're right that Wake won't teach you completely up-to-date skillsets, but most everyone I know from the WFU Comp Sci program (that didn't struggle mightily with programming) either taught themselves exactly what they needed to land a job (using their education as a foundation) or learned it pretty easily in the first 1-2 years on the job.

I'm biased towards start-ups and programming as a full stack engineer, but I've never felt like I was competing with cheaper/foreign talent from anywhere else on the world. You get what you pay for, and most of the code churned out of India is not top quality. That's mostly anecdotal based on my hiring/interview experiences with the few people that have made it far enough down in our recruiting chain. All of our most successful hires have been recent grads with a Comp Sci education who just needed a few months to get up-to-speed with common software development toolchains and methodologies.
 
DCDeac said:
This is an interesting question. A lot of my friends at Wake were sold pretty hard on just studying what interested them and picking a major they were intrigued by. Then out in the real world they were like, "You know, when I was choosing a major, I kind of wish someone had walked through the realities of salaries, job opportunities, where the top markets were located, etc."

There's probably a balance in there somewhere, but I definitely knew some people who really regretted going the "just do what you enjoy" path a few years later.
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DC, agree with your sentiments. As a Spanish major, I found the Summer Management Program to be very beneficial in finding that balance.

http://business.wfu.edu/non-degree-seeking-programs/summer-management-program/
 
Deacfan2009 said:
Doesn't becoming a great coder kind of imply learning how to build scalable architecture and or working with open stack solutions? You're right that Wake won't teach you completely up-to-date skillsets, but most everyone I know from the WFU Comp Sci program (that didn't struggle mightily with programming) either taught themselves exactly what they needed to land a job (using their education as a foundation) or learned it pretty easily in the first 1-2 years on the job.

I'm biased towards start-ups and programming as a full stack engineer, but I've never felt like I was competing with cheaper/foreign talent from anywhere else on the world. You get what you pay for, and most of the code churned out of India is not top quality. That's mostly anecdotal based on my hiring/interview experiences with the few people that have made it far enough down in our recruiting chain. All of our most successful hires have been recent grads with a Comp Sci education who just needed a few months to get up-to-speed with common software development toolchains and methodologies.
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Actually it very often doesn't in my experience. I had a brief stint writing code before I moved to enterprise architecture, and even our best developers here (DHS) are focused solely on code and not the surrounding systems and environments because they've been at it for so long. And although you may not have run into it, I've worked with a few companies who have axed dozens of coders for overseas or near-shore replacements. I'm not surprised at all that Wake Comp Sci grads wouldn't have as much trouble - most of the guys I knew were smart, well spoken, and interested in a wide variety of stuff which is extremely hard to find in a technical resource. But if I had a dollar for every coder who wrote files directly to local tmp space, made long-running synchronous calls to external services, had no idea how basic unix permission and file ownership worked, hardcoded paths behind url rewrites - well, that's my job so I guess I probably do have a dollar for whenever that happens. But it happens a lot.

I will say that if you're coming up now - so many technologies are folding inward that it's much harder to avoid knowing more of the end-to-end solution than it used to be. Plus I'm in government so we tend to shy away from the new stuff. I've never worked on like a big Hadoop/Mongo project or anything like that, so that probably makes a big difference.
 
leftcoastdeac said:
Ditch medicine and go for Mathematical econ with CS minor.
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Medicine seems like a more stable career, but truth be told, I don't really know what job exactly the above would prepare you for. He will take his AP credits for Calculus and happily never take another math class.
 
DemonDeacon92 said:
Medicine seems like a more stable career, but truth be told, I don't really know what job exactly the above would prepare you for. He will take his AP credits for Calculus and happily never take another math class.
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lol so much wrong in the first sentence.
 
DemonDeacon92 said:
Medicine seems like a more stable career, but truth be told, I don't really know what job exactly the above would prepare you for. He will take his AP credits for Calculus and happily never take another math class.
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The career of making $buckets
 
DistrictDeacon said:
The career of making $buckets
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Pretty much; the Mathematical Econ major will give him a solid quantitative background that he can carry into any number of fields (marketing, finance, technology, business/consulting, insurance, healthcare, government, etc), and the CS minor will give him some technical chops that will allow him to take on more advanced roles with respect to analysis and data driven decision making. He can immediately enter the workforce with practical skills (unlike being pre-med) and can go back for an MBA or Advanced Math/CS degree later depending on what he wants to do. And he can do Math-Econ/CS in 4 years without taking on the excessive overhead debt associated with a medical degree.

We're collecting more and more data and there is an extreme shortage of people that know how to look at it, analyze it, draw meaningful conclusions from it, and make decisions based on it. Big Data and Analytics are the next sector for tech innovation and strategic use of data is going to be how companies differentiate themselves in the market place.

Ultimately if he's not into it, he's not into it, but medicine, as a profession, has a much higher barrier to entry, far less demand, and much narrower long term job prospects (i.e., if he hates it, he's not well qualified for many other things).
 
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texasdeac said:
lol so much wrong in the first sentence.
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I guess by stable I mean you're not going to be without a job with an MD. You're certainly not going to make as much as in the past, and a lot of crap to deal with due to Obamacare, meaningful use, etc.
 
My son started this year as well. Although I'm still pissed at paying over $60k, I have to admit the school did a good job the last couple of days getting the kids moved in and oriented. Everything was very classy. It was funny to hear Hatch make a Fruedian (sp) slip in his speech today, and refer to the dean as having worked at Notre Dame, not Wake Forest. Someone told me he does this on a fairly regular basis - I guess he's dreaming of the day he can return to South Bend in some greater capacity.
All-in-all, a pretty solid job the last few days.
 
deac85 said:
My son started this year as well. Although I'm still pissed at paying over $60k, I have to admit the school did a good job the last couple of days getting the kids moved in and oriented. Everything was very classy. It was funny to hear Hatch make a Fruedian (sp) slip in his speech today, and refer to the dean as having worked at Notre Dame, not Wake Forest. Someone told me he does this on a fairly regular basis - I guess he's dreaming of the day he can return to South Bend in some greater capacity.
All-in-all, a pretty solid job the last few days.
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Not sure that there is a greater capacity than the one that he formerly held (or at least one attainable for a member of the laity).
 
There is no greater capacity for him at Notre Dame. That's part of the issue. He was provost, the highest position a non-priest could have.
 
PhDeac said:
There is no greater capacity for him at Notre Dame. That's part of the issue. He was provost, the highest position a non-priest could have.
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I know, dude; that is exactly what I said. I have noticed recently that, at times, you have a tendency to recapitulate my comments exactly.
 
I wasn't responding to you. I was responding to deac85. You just responded before me because I looked up the ND organizational chart just to make sure I was right.
 
Gotcha; have some confidence! Respond immediately without considering the consequences of your comments like I do.
 
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