DeVry and Career Advice

[Jonathan Hutchins]

I shopped around the various College and Tech schools for an Electronics
program a few years back, and I heard something that I thought might be
useful for a potential DeVry applicant.  This was from someone who was in a
position to hire people with degrees/training in electronics for an Avionics
manufacturer.

He said "DeVry's strength is it's national reputation as a technical school,
and it's network of job placement contacts in other cities.  The school in
KC is not as good as the others on which their reputation is based, and
their placement network here is practically non-existent.  DeVry would be a
good bet for someone who intended to apply only in other cities where DeVry
has a strong presence.  It's a poor investment for someone planning to
remain in K.C."

Jared, my advice would be to get a Bachelor's or Associates in Liberal Arts,
and to get some experience somewhere like Gateway or H&R Bloch's Tech
Support phone banks.  You can take a certification class for the "A +"
certification at just about any Computer Training Center in town, and that
will get you started at a Tech Support Phone Desk job.  They have night
shifts that would allow you to go to school during the day, and you'd end up
with the best of both worlds: a degree AND experience.

If you want to become a programmer, studying a programming language is a
poor investment.  Your best education would be to study Mathematics and
Creative Writing.  That's if you want to end up being a serious, high-level
programmer, not just someone who maintains old Bank code.

If you want to be a hardware technician, I can't think of a better way to
start than to join the Armed Services.  You have to determine what you want,
and you have to determine that YOU will make the effort to get the most out
of your service, not just float along and take whatever they give you.  If
you do that it can be a great start, and it's about the only way to get a
real hands-on background in electronics hardware.

You'll find that a lot of people in the Computer Industry have backgrounds
in other industries and disciplines.  Understanding how various businesses
operate, and how people in various disciplines think are skills that will
get you a lot farther than the latest fashion in coding languages.  This is
why a Liberal Arts background can be such a good start.

USDL statistics show that while someone who specializes in a computer
related degree will have a higher starting salary than someone with a
non-computer degree in the same computer-related job, within two years the
salaries will be equal - which implies better growth for the non-comp.
degree.

The highest starting salaries go to people who take advanced degrees in
Theoretical Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics, because of their ability to
do advanced work in the algorithms that underlie financial programming.