Going back to school
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I just finished a meeting with one of my collegues in which we discussed our recruiting trip back to our alma mater, Stephen F. Austin State University. For those of you who do not know, SFA is a smaller state school located in beautiful Nacogdoches, Texas and has a reputation for being an excellent forestry and teaching university. But what most people do not know about SFA is that the business school is accredited by AACSB International-The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business. Only about 29 percent of the business schools in the United States share this distinction. I graduated from SFA in December of 1999 with a bachelor of business administration in computer information systems and coincidentally, sat next to one of my best friends, pledge brother and roommate for 3 years - Jason Ortega - during graduation.
The other fact that is not well known is the quality of the computer science department at SFA. The faculty doesn't mess around with teaching visual basic and calling it a computer science degree. When I went through the CIS program, I was enrolled in all but two classes in the true computer science degree plan. When I graduated, it was almost as if I had double majored in CS and business. Most schools nowadays are selling MIS degrees, where they teach "analysis" and a few computer science courses. While those students are learning how to build a requirements document, SFA's CIS students are doing 8 dimensional arrays on a mainframe (RIP Dr. Dailey).
So now I get to go back and mingle with my old professors as a colleague and not a student. It will be interesting to see how my perceptions will change seeing them in a new light. Not only do I get to present in front of the 426 class and do a presentation to the Computer Science Club later that afternoon, but I get to spend the better part of 2 days just hanging out on campus talking with students and enjoying the academic side of things.