The 'Pipeline' from Business to IS

I wanted to take a little time to share about my journey into tech because I wish I had come across a post like this before I started. If you don't have the time to read through all of this, the tldr is that I started off as a business major, transferred to IS and I think it's one of the best decisions I've made in college (if not the only good one).

Origins

I took my first intro to programming course (15-112 (opens in a new tab)) at CMU a little more than a year ago and suffice to say its changed the trajectory of my life. That's not to imply that the course was fantastic, it was actually quite the opposite. But it opened my eyes to what was out there in terms of career paths and what I could do with my time at college.

I came into Carnegie Mellon majoring in Business. I had no idea what I wanted to do. Part of why I picked business as my major despite having been a STEM student all my life was because I didn't really want to follow down the path that I saw my parents and so many people in my family go down. I knew being an engineer was tough and they weren't necessarily earning the big bucks. I wanted to do something different.

Sure business isn't really all THAT different, but no one in my circle had gone down that route before and I knew it was the career with likely the best 'brainpower-expended-to-money-earned' ratio (assuming you stick to the standard IB/Consulting path and not the quant rabbit hole).

The other reason was that as an international student, I knew my odds of getting into a college in the US were extremely low and even more so if I had to apply through a STEM program where I would be competing with scores of other equally if not more qualified international students. I hadn't won any crazy competitions or had any outstanding extra-curriculars in STEM so it was very much a 'find the easiest way in' type situation. I was on a scholarship at the time so I knew I just had to get accepted somewhere and CMU ended up being the school that took me in.

Business at CMU

For anyone who's interested, the business program at CMU is one of the few 4 year programs that students can enroll into from day 1 (i.e. you can apply directly to business instead of having to transfer in at the end of your freshman or sophomore year).

As an international student I was under the impression that since the Business Administration program at CMU awarded a B.S., that it'd count under the STEM OPT Extension (opens in a new tab) program but I was wrong. They disburse those based on major and not degree type and unfortunately Business Administration doesn't qualify. You could very easily make up for this by just declaring an additional major/minor in something technical like Statistics or CS but I didn't know it at the time and it served as another factor that motivated me to switch out.

What I liked about Business

For context, I'm still holding on to a minor in Business Administration and I've taken a few more business classes after I switched. They haven't influenced my impression of the major in any significant way but they're good fillers in between the rigor of my more technical classes.

1. The rigor

   I think the one thing Tepper does right is really expose you to the more technical side of business? I'm not sure if that's the right way to put it but I think the curriculum is a little more rigorous than what you'd find at other business schools.

   In my freshman fall I was dealing with what was essentially a boiled down version of stochastic calculus, couched in business problems. I think that's pretty cool in theory. I've heard from other friends that some of the upper level classes are also fairly technical with their coverage of economic theory, market analytics or financial models.

2. The people (vs the stereotype of business students)

   It's a little bit of a mixed bag but for the most part, I think they're pretty cool and the school does a good job of attracting some incredibly capable people across the student body. Business kids are still hovering somewhere near the bottom of the lot in terms of the respect they get at CMU though and I mean for a school with such technical strengths can you really blame them?

What I disliked about Business

1. The rigor

   Notice I mentioned the rigor being cool in theory. In practice it was a little bit of a mess and it felt very much like it was trying too hard to stand out among the crowd. I'm sorry but realistically you're not getting into a bulge bracket bank because you know a little more calculus than the next guy.

2. The 'Sheep Syndrome'

   Another big gripe I had with business as a whole was that it felt like a huge echo chamber of folks all running around doing the same pre-professional things. I have nothing against it but like seriously what even is networking???

   It's such a circular concept. You network to get a job and once you're in the job you become the network everyone's trying to reach out to to get a job?? And mind you everyone's in on the absurdity of it all but the general sense I get from the people around me is that if that's what you have to do then that's what you have to do.

   This doesn't discount the existence of this syndrome across a myriad of other fields but I think it's especially pronounced in Business

I very quickly realised by the end of my freshman year that if that's what I had to do to thrive in the industry then I didn't want it.

I recognize this sounds whiny or privileged but I worked a finance job before college and I knew what people actually did on the job was so far off from what school was teaching us. It just didn't make sense for me to have to sit through all that just to break into the field and I figured whatever the case, I'd be better off learning something that would make the cost of tuition worth it and figure out how to break into banking/consulting/business after I graduated if I still wanted to.

The Switch + What is Information Systems?

After a little bit of research (not that much) I landed upon Information Systems as the major I wanted to switch to. People still ask me what IS is and till this day I don't have a good answer but I think the easiest way to describe it is that it's a balance between CS and Business. If you think of the CS folks as the guys writing the algorithms to improve runtime and the business folks as the ones who are trying to figure out how to make the most money, IS is the middle ground where you're trying to figure out how to create scalable, sustainable and profitable technical solutions to support the business.

And a lot of this comes down to actually just studying how to build cool things with code and also understand how to capitalize on the economic value of what you're building.

What I liked about IS

1. The rigor

   Yeah I know this is sounding repetitive but this rigor was so different from what I was encountering in Business. This rigor felt useful.

   I was learning concepts I had never known before and I was seeing how it was being applied in the tools I was using in my daily life. I took CMU's infamous follow up class to 15-112 (15-122 Principles of Imperative Computation) last summer and I was immediately blown away by the beauty and complexity of the work that had been done in CS. I felt like a kid again sitting in my first chemistry class and learning about the crazy things people invented with a bunch of rocks and chemicals. I was hooked.

   While not all of that enthusiasm stuck around for the subsequent classes I took as an IS student, I was very much still under the impression that the things I was learning and struggling with were things that would be useful to me in the future, regardless of my career or industry. Lord knows if I'll ever create a SQL query for my future job but I'd like to say that knowing how to execute CRUD operations and communicate the purpose of a database to a non-technical audience is a skill that pays dividends somewhere down the line.

2. The flexibility

   As an IS major, we only have 5 core classes in our curriculum and the rest are either gen-eds or breadth electives that we can choose to take. The curriculum is structured in such a way that I think for most people, you end up touching a little bit of everything you'd need to develop as a good programmer. And you still have room to dive deeper into something else with an additional major or minor! Most IS students I know have a double with CS or Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Some like me, are pursuing something on the business end, and others are doing something completely unrelated like Creative Writing or Music.

What I dislike about IS

1. It isn't well known

   I think this is becoming less of a problem as the years go on but as of right now it still very much feels like employers, recruiters and the industry in general don't know what to make of IS. And I get it too because it's like a weird mix of CS and Business and it's hard to figure out what exactly we're good at. If someone wanted a software engineer they'd just hire a CS major and if they wanted a business analyst they'd just hire a Business major. IS fits into such a niche that it'd be hard to find a career that's perfect for IS.

   A lot of people, me included, want to break into the Technical Product Management field because it just generally feels like a career where you get the best of both the technical and the business side of things. It feels like exactly what the major was created to address but again it's such a niche field and jobs in product management have been growing at an excruciatingly slow pace that most IS students I know just end up working as software engineers or tech/management consultants.

2. The core is poorly managed

   Again this is a pro and a con that sort of follows on from the previous point but I think the core classes are a little lacking in terms of the technical depth they go into.

   The first IS class I took was a database class and to be completely honest with you I don't think I learned anything that I couldn't have learned from a 2 hour crash course on YouTube. In fact I found the class incredibly tough not because of the content but because of the way it was graded and it made no sense to me why the course was structured so poorly. I didn't actually learn anything useful about creating databases and connecting them and really working with a more complicated warehouse or data lake but I could whip up a shoddy domain model that you'd probably ask me to redraw again.

   The second class I took was the Application Design and Development class and I think this was simultaneously useful and useless at the same time. Useful because the professor (shoutout Prof H) was hilarious, lovely and just an all-round great guy who made me actually understand the architecture of what we were building. But it was also useless because we were taught the class in Ruby on Rails which is a framework that's pretty much dead in the industry. I think the class would have been a lot more useful if we were taught something like React or Angular or even just vanilla JS. I think the concepts we learned were useful but the tools we used were not. Plus grading was just not transparent and frankly horrendous (which seems to be a theme across IS classes in general)

That being said though, I still wouldn't trade any of this for another major. I think I've found a good balance of technical classes that push me and a bunch of other gen-eds and breadth electives that I can take to round out my broader education. It's opened my eyes far more than my time in Business has and I'm grateful for that.