Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!think!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!ucsfcgl!cgl.ucsf.edu!seibel
From: seibel@cgl.ucsf.edu (George Seibel%Kollman)
Newsgroups: comp.edu
Subject: Re: What is CS? (Was re First languages)
Message-ID: <10771@cgl.ucsf.EDU>
Date: 31 Mar 88 09:20:09 GMT
References: <1522@ucdavis.ucdavis.edu> <364@abcom.ATT.COM> <3684@medusa.cs.purdue.edu>
Sender: daemon@cgl.ucsf.edu
Reply-To: seibel@socrates.ucsf.edu.UUCP (George Seibel)
Organization: UCSF Computer Graphics Lab
Lines: 34

In article <3684@medusa.cs.purdue.edu> tlh@cs.purdue.EDU (Thomas L. Hausmann) writes:
>In article <364@abcom.ATT.COM>, rgsmeb@abcom.ATT.COM (Michel Behna) writes:
>> From article <1522@ucdavis.ucdavis.edu>, by windley@iris.ucdavis.edu (Phil Windley):
>> > I couldn't care less what language my students need to know to get a job
>> > with IBM.  They should know how to program, they should be able to deal
>> > with abstraction, they should be able to design algorithms, but they
>> > shouldn't necessarily learn JCL, COBOL (ugh!), or even C because that's
>> > what HP wants.  
>> > Phil Windley
>> You may not care but as someone who graduated and had to find a job I think
>> you are wrong. Academia has the singular privilege of being able to afford
>> to hire unknowledgeable (read unskilled) people and training them.
>
>Do you also think it is a Univerisity's place to train people for industrial
>jobs?  If you want to learn SKILLS while in school, internships and coop programs
>are your options.  You MAY get job specific skills at a college or university,
>but to say a university "trains" people is not accurate.  [...]

I'll side with Michel on this one.  The University seems to have cornered
the market on prestige and lofty knowledge, but to put knowledge to work
and do something practical with it is somehow unclean.  What's the deal
here?  Why can't we be both literate and skilled?  I don't believe that
our society can afford too many "armchair computer scientists".   We need
people who are capable of putting ideas into action.  I notice some of the
most successful scientists in my field are people who have technical
skills as well as theoretical expertise.  When they have an idea, they
can put it into practice quickly, instead of having to cajole some postdoc
or grad student into coding it up for them.   From my experience with
wide-eyed CS grads who were incapable of dealing with real world problems,
I suggest that CS could stand a dose of reality.

George Seibel
Dept. of Pharmaceutical Chemistry
UC San Francisco