MIS: A Positive Experience

College Majors Business Majors
1

<p>After reading multiple threads and posts about MIS, I got a vibe from this forum that a lot of people had a negative experience at their school in this subject area. I decided to write an informational thread with the positive experience I had at University of North Dakota.</p>

<p>This thread may be kind of long, but I am going to do it in sections:

  1. MIS Class Requirements at UND
  2. What I learned
  3. Job Offers
  4. Graduate School
  5. Conclusion</p>

<li>MIS Class Requirements(University of North Dakota)</li>
</ol>

<p>Accounting- 9 credits
Finance- 3 credits
Economics- 12 credits
Math/Stats- 9 credits
Management- 9 credits
Computer Science- 16 credits (1 year of Visual Basic and 1 year of Java)
MIS- 37 credits
Operating Systems- 3 credits
Advanced Office (Excel and Access 2007)- 4 credits
Database Design/Development- 6 credits
Networking- 6 credits
Web Programming (PHP, ColdFusion and MySQL)- 6 credits
IT Management- 3 credits
Systems Analysis and Design- 3 credits
Records Management- 3 credits
MIS Capstone- 3 credits</p>

<li>What I learned</li>
</ol>

<p>My MIS program was incredibly enriching as in the beginning we learned the hard concepts of business we also learned basic programming skills from the computer science core. Once we knew the business and the programming, our upper level MIS classes blended these concepts together. We would apply advanced programming and database design techniques to develop and manipulate useful business based databases. A few of these databases and programs that we designed were actually picked up by companies in the upper Midwest for commercial use. We created multiple useful projects in teams similar to business concept/ software engineering teams in the real world. Overall I graduated a very well rounded student highly capable of working in the business world in IT or any other discipline of business.</p>

<li>Job Offers</li>
</ol>

<p>In my final semester of undergrad I received multiple offers from businesses and IT firms across the country. I put my resume on monster.com almost as a joke and ended up getting multiple calls for phone interviews from reputable companies such as Cargill, Dell, Robert Half Tech. I went to the career fair and had a few on the fly interviews, mainly with Microsoft and Oracle. If I had to put a salary average on my offers, they were generally between 40-50k a year, my highest was 55k.</p>

<li>Graduate School</li>
</ol>

<p>The job offers and interviews I received were for junior developer and business analyst type jobs. Though I was intrigued by these offers I really enjoyed academics and I began thinking hard about grad school. I really enjoyed programming, but I am not a math whiz, so comp sci was a little out of my reach. I applied to 5 schools for Software Engineering which is essentially the applied side of comp sci. I am now attending Depaul University pursuing an M.S. in Software Engineering.</p>

<li>Conclusion</li>
</ol>

<p>Overall, I had a wonderful time in MIS at a relatively small school (about 14,000 undergrads) I learned a lot and it set me up for success. I find it unfortunate that a number of people either think MIS is worthless or they majored in it from a school that lacked the necessary class work. MIS is useful and its not for the same jobs as Computer Science majors. Some CS and MIS jobs do overlap, but with MIS you can get jobs which need vital business skills. IT project management is an example of a position that is tailored for MIS and needed in every business. Thank you and I will take any questions or comments graciously.</p>

2

<p>Did you ever get hands on with any system implementations? Have access to SAP, Oracle, etc?</p>

<p>This major gets paid fairly well and if couple with a business or an accounting major can be very valuable and opens up for more possibilities if one wants to work for say, the big 4. Also very useful in finance as well…don’t know the application however to the job market.</p>

<p>Probably wont get many replies in this thread anyway. Can i ask y some say SAP is not a true tier 3 system?</p>

3

<p>I don’t know much about SAP, but I believe it can be configured either as a 2 tier or a 3 tier system, with the 2 tier system utilizing on a database on the application server, and the 3 tier system having a seperate database server.</p>

4

<p>I did get hands on experience with a lot of Oracle products, the 6 credits in databases were very thorough and technical covering everything from design to manipulation to database programming. Thank you.</p>

5

<p>well a professor is saying SAP isnt trully tier 3 because you have download the client gui onto a computer and that it cant run of a dumb terminal.</p>

6

<p>This obviously shows my lack of familiarity with SAP. Perhaps he means that SAP utilizes a thick client (i.e. an application that runs on your computer…like MS Word, excel etc) rather than a thin client (like a website that runs on an application server).</p>

<p>…with a thin client, the logic would be put on the application server and only the presentation tier would be on the client…where as, with a thick client both would generally be on the client server.</p>