Many years ago, when I decided to go to Virginia Tech, I had to pick a major. After narrowing the choices down to Computer Science (CS), Computer Engineering (CPE), and Business Information Technology (BIT), I chose CPE and CS. The funny thing is, all I do is web development, which is mainly taught in BIT courses. This caused me to start thinking, should I have been a BIT major?
What I began to realize is that both CS and BIT have their own strengths and weaknesses.
CS majors leave college with a great programming background. During college, I implemented dozens of applications. I left college with a great understanding of design patterns, data structures, and much more. At the same time, I received no web development experience.
BIT majors on the other hand, don’t get as much programming experience but they do get more real world, web application experience in addition to their project management experience. In the past few weeks, I have interviewed numerous BIT majors that have implemented data driven websites as class projects. Unfortunately, their programming skills seemed lacking when compared to most CS majors.
To me, it makes sense that BIT majors have more project management experience and less coding experience. What doesn’t make sense is why CS majors don’t focus more on web development. I think colleges need to start recognizing the importance of preparing CS majors for the real world, which now revolves around web applications.