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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
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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