Designing a cooperative education program to support an IT strategic plan

  • Authors:
  • Jeffrey A. Lasky;Michael Cardillo

  • Affiliations:
  • Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY;Excellus BlueCross BlueShield, Rochester, NY

  • Venue:
  • CITC5 '04 Proceedings of the 5th conference on Information technology education
  • Year:
  • 2004
  • IT education 2.0

    Proceedings of the 10th ACM conference on SIG-information technology education

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

This paper is a qualitative field report describing how undergraduate computing majors in a cooperative education (co-op) program are supporting a large company's efforts to acquire Java application development expertise and experience. The program has been in place for two years. The major finding to date is that talented undergraduate computing majors can make significant contributions to a corporate IT division undergoing a transition from legacy to contemporary software development platforms. A second finding is that common information systems problems present good intellectual challenges to students majoring in computer science, in information technology, and in software engineering. Finally, student teams that include representation from two or more computing disciplines can effectively combine their differing skill sets to solve software problems. More generally, these and related findings suggest that undergraduate computing majors represent an underutilized technical and economic asset.