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1993-08-01
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Memories of a DP Major
by Dave Bealer
Many of the senior people in the data processing field today do not
have a Computer Science/Data Processing degree. There is a perfectly
good explanation for this, of course. When they were in college
there was *no such thing* as a DP degree. Not that this is
necessarily a bad thing, mind you. One of the most talented systems
programmers I've ever known has a bachelors degree in music
performance (piano) and a masters degree in education. She taught
music in public school before going into computers. This is quite
believable, since she still brings the same stentorian presence to
any room she enters. I do feel sorry for the folks who didn't major
in DP; they missed out on some interesting times.
I received a Bachelor of Business Administration degree in 1985 from
a large public university in the eastern United States. Said school
shall remain nameless since I'm not done paying for the degree and I
don't want them trying to repossess my education. Anyway, the major
was called Computer Applications, but was promptly changed to the
sensible name of Management Information Systems right after they
printed my degree.
The original plan was to major in computer science, but my allergic
reaction to calculus quickly torpedoed that notion. Mathematicians
love to throw around strange Greek letters and call them scientific.
There are two problems here. One, the mathematicians don't REALLY
know what all those Greek letters mean either. Two, only those
programmers/analysts working on actual scientific/engineering
projects actually need all that math. The rest of us are better
served by knowing how to do basic arithmetic in hexadecimal. Folks
who can't even handle that often become doctors, the morally bankrupt
ones become lawyers, and the totally illiterate ones usually become
PC software documentation writers.
My degree program, being business oriented, required two semesters of
COBOL programming for graduation. Now I was raised on structured
programming techniques, with Pascal as my first computer language.
Trying to learn COBOL effected my brain much like shifting into
reverse at 220 miles per hour on the back straight at Indianapolis
effects the car. I remain convinced to this day that COBOL is really
a long term terrorist plot to undermine the efficiency of programming
teams everywhere.
More than half of our DP/CS professors were from countries other than
the United States. This was culturally enlightening, but many of
these folks had evidently failed their "English as a Second Language"
courses. The really strange thing about the non-native instructors
was the inverse relationship between their English speaking ability
and their technical ability/attitude towards the students. The profs
with good English skills often seemed as lazy and incompetent as the
worst of their American colleagues. The instructors with a limited
mastery of English were mostly eager and knowledgeable, which made
their impaired ability to get the information across doubly
frustrating, both for them and the students.
A great example of this phenomenon was a pair of professors from the
same country in the Middle East. We'll call them Prof. A and Prof. B
for the purposes of this study. Prof. A had an excellent command of
the English language, as well as several others. He also had a lousy
attitude towards the students. He wasn't very helpful to students
who desperately needed help. He was too busy promoting himself to
anyone who could conceivably do his career some good. Students
didn't fall into that category, so they were mostly ignored. This
man was almost always three to five minutes late for classes, which
were an interruption of his self-promotional activities. The really
galling thing was the fact that this character had the nerve to state
in a local newspaper interview that American students were, "lazy and
always late for class." It's a good thing I wasn't in the same room
with him when I read that interview, or I'd be writing this article
in prison. BTW, I'm convinced that the fact that Professor A was my
instructor for both semesters of torture, er, COBOL has absolutely
nothing to do with my low opinion of him.
Professor B had a great deal of trouble with English. This didn't
stop him from teaching such topics as IBM 370 Assembler Language. He
simply kept coming up with new ways of trying to get the concept
across until at least a few of us figured it out. Anyone who has
studied assembler can verify that not everyone gets through such a
class no matter how good the instructor is, or how many times he goes
over the material.
I now work in a monster mainframe installation where the disk storage
is measured by the terabyte and folks have been known to get lost for
weeks in the DASD farm. Today my average dataset takes two cylinders
of 3390 cache subsystem. And we're talking source code and JCL, not
data. In college we only had 10 tracks of 3350 storage for each
computer course we were taking. Some desperate students tried to
make paper tape storage out of old pizza boxes. In one course we
were even forced to keypunch our programs on cards. Yuck!
Well, I'm almost recovered from my experiences at "Old State". I
still wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night sometimes,
wondering how I can possibly complete the thirty major papers,
programs and miscellaneous assignments due before the term ends next
week. Of course once the realization hits home that it was only a
dream, that I only have to get up and go to work tomorrow, the relief
is overwhelming. {RAH}
--------------
Dave Bealer is a thirty-something mainframe systems programmer who
works with CICS, MVS and all manner of nasty acronyms at one of the
largest heavy metal shops on the East Coast. He shares a waterfront
townhome in Pasadena, MD. with two cats who annoy him endlessly as he
writes and electronically publishes RAH. FidoNet> 1:261/1129
Internet: dbealer@access.digex.net