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ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing
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This quarterly publication is a
quarterly journal that publishes
refereed articles addressing issues
of computing as it impacts the
lives of people with disabilities.
The journal will be of particular
interest to SIGACCESS members
and delegrates to its affiliated
conference (i.e., ASSETS), as well
as other international accessibility
conferences.
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www.acm.org/taccess
www.acm.org/subscribe
Computer science is a good place to
start. I know the field reasonably well
and I also have a sense for the job market—which is tight and growing tighter
every day. It is a field where degrees can
be valuable, but the ability to design
and execute on open-ended, complex
projects is paramount; 17-year-olds
with unusual creativity and intellect
have been know to get six-figure salaries. Because of the demand for talent
and the recognition that college degrees and high GPAs are not the best
predictor of creativity, intellect, or passion, top employers have begun to treat
summer internships as something of a
farm league. They observe students
actually working and make offers to those
who perform the best. Employers know
that working with a student is an infinitely better assessment than any degree or transcript.
Students have also begun to recognize something very counterintuitive:
that they are more likely to get an intellectual grasp of computer science—
which is really the logical and algorithmic side of mathematics—by working
at companies like Google, Microsoft,
or Facebook or trying to create their
own mobile applications than by reading textbooks or sitting in lecture halls.
They see the real-world projects as being more intellectually challenging
and open-ended than the somewhat
artificial projects given in classrooms.
Even more, they know that the product of their efforts has the potential to
touch millions of people instead of just
being graded by a teaching assistant
and thrown away.
So, to be clear, in software engineering, the internship and self-directed
projects have become far more valu-
employers know
that working
with a student is
an infinitely better
assessment than any
degree or transcript.
able to the students, as an intellectual
learning experience, than any university class. And they have become more
valuable to employers, as a signal of
student ability, than any formal credential, class taken, or grade point average.
When it comes to internships, I
want to emphasize that these are very
different from the ones many people
remember having even 20 years ago.
There is no getting coffee for the boss,
sorting papers or doing other types of
busywork. The projects are not just
cute things to work on that have no
impact on real people. In fact, the best
way to differentiate between forward-looking, 21st century industries and
old-school, backward-looking ones is
to see what interns are doing. At top
Internet companies, interns might be
creating patentable artificial intelligence algorithms or even creating new
lines of business. By contrast, at a law
firm, government office, or publishing
house, they will be doing paperwork,
scheduling meetings, and proofreading text. This trivial work will be paid
accordingly, if at all, whereas pay scales
at the new-style internships reflect the
seriousness of the work involved.
Given the increasing importance
of real-world projects in terms of both
intellectual enrichment and enhancement of job prospects, why do traditional colleges tend to limit them to
summers, pushing them aside to cater
to the calendar needs of lectures and
homework? The answer is simple inertia—this is how it has always been done,
so people have not really questioned it.
Actually, some universities have.
Despite being founded not even 60
years ago, the University of Waterloo
is generally considered to be Canada’s
top engineering school. Walk down
a hallway at Microsoft or Google and
you will find as many Waterloo grads
as those from MIT, Stanford, or Berkeley—despite the fact that, because of
work visa issues, it is a significant hassle for U.S. employers to hire Canadian
nationals. And this is not some attempt
to get low-cost labor from across the
border—Waterloo graduates are commanding salaries as high as the very
best American grads. What is Waterloo
doing right?
For one thing, Waterloo recognized
the value of internships long ago (they
call them co-ops) and has made them