Recruiting IT majors

IT professors need to recruit students to major in IT/MIS.

I am back in my blog space. I have been busy with my usual tasks of teaching, research, grading exams and assignment and also advising students with regards to coursework for the next semester. As I looked back this past week or so, I also have been engaging and recruiting students to be IT majors. You must be thinking what are you doing that for? The students surely must have decided their majors by now. True and not true. Some colleges allow students to have double majors and I always ask myself why not consider us IT majors. So based on the students performance in class, exams, homework and their work ethics, I approached each student and took some time to talk to them to consider IT. We have had our shortage of IT majors the last few years and I believe you have to do this for the next few years to get the students to consider this as a career. Otherwise the status quo will yield similar or worse results.
I love sports and I see recruiting IT majors very similar to recruiting basketball players for college. Surely, everyone wants to play for the best of the best but if a serious college likes a student athlete, the recruiter has to be persistent in discussing the opportunities of playing for a different school instead of your popular basketball schools. So if you are serious about getting your number of majors to go up, you need to work the extra mile to get these students. You are teaching the introductory class. You have all these “eyeballs” staring at you in class so take the opportunity to know them, share their strengths and promote IT to them. Students need assurance that they can do a major let alone an IT major. Remember they have nightmares about IT as a purely programming analyst position. You have to be there as a coach and advise them. And when they get their first internship, they cannot help but be thankful that you open this road that they never consider in the first place. There is a lot of personal satisfaction especially for myself in knowing that you are part of the students journey as an IT major and eventually starting their career in IT.

You also need to get former students who were once non-IT majors to share with the class and discuss their journey from being a non-IT major to an IT major to securing IT internships and eventually a successful IT-related career. Every student wants to feel “loved” so give them some love and tell them what this journey will be like when they go through. They want to see a recent graduate, a Gen Y, and the transformation process. You will be surprised if you simply do just this ie. recent graduates presenting to your class, the eventual effects on the number of IT majors will be phenomenal.

The introductory class needs to be taught by someone who is passion about IT with an infectious personality that will be able to channel that passion in IT to the students. The instructor in the class has to double her/his duty as mentor and a teacher. Someone who cares and see the potential in each of the students in the class and someone who is never satisfied and will always find a better way of delivery content in class. If you don’t do this, the numbers will continue to decline and no slogans, T-shirts and gimmicks will ever get them back. You need to knock on every door to sell your program.

You need to be a recruiter for IT major.

Running a successful class in information technology (Part 1)

So your syllabus is planned, you have the textbooks, now is the time for you to execute the study plan in teaching a class in IT. My experience in teaching a successful IT classes always have the following elements: the setup, high expectations, rigor, challenge, celebration and self-discovery. I am going to write these tips in 3 different posts, so for some of you who is catching up on the blogs, you have to read this in reverse order i.e. the older posts first and the recent ones last.

The setup

You have to set the tone on the first day of class. You need to make a name tag for each of the students and give indications that you intend to know all the names by the end of the semester. This seems to give the same effects as the movie, Meet the Parents when Robert De Niro who uses his two fingers and point into his eyes and say they he is observing and focusing closely on Ben Stiller who intends to marry his daughter. The first thing I always tell all new incoming students to my course is that if they are taking a class and at any point of time do they not feel any anxiety, nervousness and uneasiness about any course, then the course really is not challenging enough for them and other than being required, why are they taking the class? I tell them that if they have to pay a lot of money for their education, they should expect me to work very hard so that they get the best of their money. I will truly provide a product that at the end of the semester, they will never think of it as a cupcake class. Every class sessions, with the name tags in place, you cold-call any student and you keep calling the next student until someone gets it right. If they make a mistake just move to the next student. This allows the student to feel safe about answering without worrying whether it is going to be correct. I assume that there is going to be some pride in each student and no one at this level wants to be wrong all the time.

Raise the expectations of the class to be very high

During the first day of class, you need to express your feelings that this class is a lot of work. If they do not have the time to devote to the class, now is the time to drop. (Most students would not drop the class just because you say it.) But it can be used as a reminder later in the semester and that they were told that there is quite a bit of work in the beginning. You do not accept any late assignment and you can write explicitly the number of assignments, quizzes, exams and project deliverables. More importantly, show them a project or two from the previous semester. It will be an eye-opening experience as the students will start to second guess themselves if they are in the right class.
However, here is where you have to be personal and said that this is doable if they work hard. You tell them that many students have completed and survived the course. That will calm the students down and indirectly they feel that if the previous students can get it done, they should be able to do so too. Tell them that when the going gets tough, you will be around to help. But they have to show you that they put in the effort.