So getting a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science was a pretty easy decision for me to make. There’s not a “Computer Engineering” degree at my school, and “Electrical Engineering” is too circuity for my tastes.
I want to do research in stuff like social computing and computational linguistics. While looking for departments with research in these fields, it’s become evident this kind of research doesn’t typically fall in the Computer Science field.
The computational linguistics stuff falls under the linguistics departments for a lot of schools. While I like the idea of researching more linguistics, I don’t know if I want to get a graduate level degree in it. It would make more sense to me to get a MD or PhD in Computer Science.
The social computing field is actually fairly new. It seems like more and more schools are starting “Information Technology” departments that are separate from their Computer Science ones.
One such school is the Rochester Institute of Technology. RIT even has a section of its website dedicated to explaining the differences between Information Technology, Computer Science, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering and Information Systems by likening it to the development of a video game:
The computer engineer would design the actual game platform, the hardware and low-level software. The software engineer would design the software architecture in which specific games would be developed and facilitate on-time development of reliable components. The computer scientist would develop efficient underlying algorithms for the game engines. The IT professional would focus on specific games from the player’s perspective.
In many ways, I’d see myself as either a software engineer, computer scientist, or IT person. When it’s described like this, none of the degrees seem “bad.” I think, however, that there’s a sort of stigma when talking about “IT” people. Mainly the idea that they’re the “tech support guy” who fixes dumb peoples’ computers.
I found yet another “new” degree at UC Irvine called the “Concentration in Informatics Track in Interactive and Collaborative Technology.” This one really seems to fit the bill in terms of the type of research and learning that I want to do. UC Irvine even has an ICT (Interactive and Collaborative Technologies) group with a bunch of people I’d probably like working with.
Once again, I think the only reservation I’d have is getting into a relatively “new” degree program, and the perceived “illegitimacy” when compared to a PhD in the almighty “Computer Science!” Then again, it might be time for the monolithic Computer Science degree to be broken into smaller, more specialized fields of study…
The last “alternative” graduate program that I’ll mention is at Georgia Tech. They offer an MS in “Human-Computer Interaction” and a PhD in “Human-Centered Computing.” Georgia Tech really seems to be one of the more progressive schools when it comes to computing degrees, and I’d be really happy to go there.
The more I read about these alternative graduate programs, the more I think that a standard graduate degree in Computer Science is becoming less relevant in a quickly changing world.
So what do you think? Is the traditional Computer Science track the way to go? Are these new fangled degrees nothing but semantic sugar? Please let me know in the comments, as I’m not quite decided on this myself.