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A Touch of Class by Cody Morris. A bi-weekly look at the McCombs School experience. |
May 18, 2001
MIS 374: Learning the Ropes in the Real World
Most college students spend four years in the classroom learning skills but never really getting a chance to use them until they graduate. Not the students in MIS 374 at the McCombs School of Business. These undergrads work with real clients who need real results, while still in school. “It’s the best learning experience,” says Eleanor Jordan, Management Information Systems professor at the McCombs School. “All the theory, all the concepts are valuable, but until the students have actually applied them, they don’t believe me.”
Jordan along with Ray McLeod, teaches MIS 374, “the capstone class” for MIS majors. After completing three smaller team projects early in the semester, students spend the last 11 weeks as part of a five-person group creating and executing actual technology solutions for real-life clients. The client projects comprise 35 percent of their final course grades, though they often soak up 99 percent of the time they spend on coursework. The MIS 374 client list includes an impressive number of technology powerhouses. Dell, IBM, National Instruments, Motorola, 3M, Tivoli—all use MIS 374 students to help them develop needed solutions for problems that their internal staff often does not have time to address.
“These companies always have more things to accomplish than they have time to do them,” says Jordan. “And the students do high quality work.”
Over the course of the last 18 years, MIS 374 students have worked with hundreds of companies, small businesses, government agencies, and non-profit organizations. Since the beginning, students have been helping organizations streamline their operations to ensure maximum efficiency. In the 1980s, they did this by writing relatively simple programs using COBOL. According to Jordan, the trend these last few years has been toward the development of web-based systems to gather, store, and manage information. “The functionality students can build into systems is so much greater now,” she says.
One of the Spring 2001 teams recently retooled the website for a local small business, EximTrade, adding greater functionality to the site and giving it a new, sleek look. The team comprised of Ali Bagheri, Sahir Sait, Juan Zuniga, Nihar Gondalia, and David Sarif took an existing site that was largely incomplete and failed to fully communicate the company background and its range of services, and reengineered it to bring it up to speed.
“It’s a remarkable before and after,” says Scott Maynard, founder of EximTrade. “The site didn’t do much to provide resources to the customer or in the way of functionality. The development team from UT provided me with a website that’s lasting, contemporary, and accurately represents me and my company.”
Clients evaluate students themselves three times during the course of the semester and meet with students weekly to discuss the progress of projects. The Austin Fire Department recently estimated that through four semesters, it has received $100,000 worth of free consulting services from MIS 374 students. The clients, however, are not the only ones who get something out of the projects. Students walk away with valuable real-life experience.“
It’s a great learning experience. You get to work with a real client and solve actual problems,” says Tazeen Lalani, a graduating senior. “Recruiters love it when I tell them I worked on a team to develop a technology solution for IC2, a real research consortium based in Austin.”
If you are interested in becoming a client please contact Eleanor Jordan at (512) 471-5240, or Ray McLeod at (512) 232-5288.
For information on specific programs at the McCombs School, consult our contacts page. For media information, contact the Communications Director by phone at 512-471-3314 or by email at CommunicationsDirector@mccombs.utexas.edu.
