(Canyon, Texas, and Poughkeepsie, N.Y.)—West Texas A&M University and IBM officials have announced a partnership designed to prepare students for a marketplace with a critical demand for expertise in large-scale computer systems.
WTAMU’s Department of Engineering and Computer Science (ECS) has joined the IBM Academic Initiative, which will provide students and faculty with free access to a wide range of IBM software, hardware and service resources. These resources have significant value and will greatly enhance the ability of the Department of ECS to deliver state-of-the-art instruction and conduct meaningful research.
The partnership is one facet of the university's creation of a new curriculum in computer science that is unique in the southwestern United States, according to H. Paul Haiduk, instructor and coordinator of WTAMU’s computer science program, who says the program’s new focus will be on large-scale (mainframe) computer systems and on open-source and open-standards technologies.
The new curriculum was developed in concert with the university’s academic restructuring in 2006 that aligned the computer science program with the engineering program and will be fully implemented in fall 2007.
“The U.S. Department of Labor is predicting that this country will need 1.5 million more computing professionals in this decade,” Haiduk said. “With the support of IBM’s Academic Initiative, we can prepare students to be better qualified for all of the promising and exciting jobs we see in today’s computing professions, particularly pertaining to large-scale systems.
“This partnership means tremendous opportunities for students and faculty, alike. It will provide numerous local, regional and national internship opportunities, while faculty will have access to many state-of-the-art software and hardware resources to support innovative teaching and research.”
Large-scale computer systems, often referred to as mainframes, are those that cost anywhere from several hundred thousand dollars to several million dollars. They are so powerful that they can do the work of hundreds of smaller computers.
Open source is a development method for software that harnesses the power of distributed peer review, promising better quality, flexibility, affordability and an end to vendor lock-in. Anyone can participate in the development of software in an open-source environment and, coupled with large-systems thinking, WTAMU students will have the opportunity to develop new software and promote entrepreneurship in the software marketplace.
The new computer science curriculum at West Texas A&M also is designed to prepare students in theoretical and algorithmic foundations of the discipline and to focus on cutting-edge developments in robotics, computer vision, intelligent systems and bioinformatics.
“Many people don’t realize that learning new mainframe skills, as students will in the computer science program at West Texas A&M, makes them competitive for very good jobs with many of the Fortune 1,000 companies,” Don R. Resnik, System z program manager for the IBM Academic Initiative, said. “Students with large-systems thinking backgrounds are better prepared for the IT industry.
“They learn about virtualization technologies, fault tolerance, recovery and service-oriented architecture. It’s clear that students with a background and skills in IBM mainframes are likely to see more and better job offers, and what our Academic Initiative is intended to do is help produce the kind of expertise that will provide our next computing-workforce generation.” 