I'm getting close to having my bachelor's degree in Management Information Systems, and I'm trying to figure out what I would like to do once I've finished. I know there are plenty of you guys that have or are in the process of getting computer-related degrees, and I would be interested in hearing what you guys do for a living or are looking into doing. My program has not been the best about information regarding what jobs an MIS degree really qualifies me for.

Basically, I'm just looking for some ideas. Any useful information would be appreciated.

I've tried to look into it, but I honestly don't understand what a MIS degree actually teaches you to do. There's lots of crappy information out there, usually on university pages, that describe fantastic notions like "the space where business and computers intersect" and some that say "the job outlook for computer scientists is good, so it follows that the job outlook for MIS is good too."

Can you give more substantial information about your program? Your program requirements?

These are more business-oriented (rather, requires some knowledge of management frameworks but I'm not sure what your degree entails) but

Product management (i.e. mktg + mgmt + tech)
Tech consulting (i.e. mgmt consulting but w/ a focus on tech)
(IT) Operations

I would just look into jobs that you're interested in and which are at companies that have people that you click with .. companies hire not only for person-job fit (i.e. qualifications) but also person-org fit, so if you apply to a bunch of companies and you hate everyone you will be miserable if you are hired and they might not hire you in the first place if you don't fit in w/ their culture.

I supervise all of the computer guys for the local municipal government.

As Pommy mentioned, MIS is business-oriented. It is part of the business college. In addition to my MIS courses, I've had courses in accounting, economics, management, finance, business law, and marketing. I suppose the best way to get an idea for what I've done is a listing of courses.

MIS:
Principles of MIS
Systems Analysis and Design
Programming (VB.NET) - 2 courses
Database Management Systems - 2 courses
IT Project Management
Strategic MIS
Telecommunications
E-Commerce

Management:
Principles of Management
Operations Management
Strategic Management

Economics:
Microeconomics
Macroeconomics
International Trade

Finance:
Principles of Finance

Accounting:
Financial Accounting
Managerial Accounting

Business Law:
Legal Environment of Business

Marketing:
Principles of Marketing
Business-to-Business Marketing

As you can see, I've had quite a few classes on a variety of subjects. What job I'm supposed to get out of these classes, I'm not sure. None of them, as far as I'm concerned, have been in depth enough to be worth a job in that particular area. I know MIS majors have typically been systems analysts, IT project managers, or IT managers, but I'm not sure if that's all that I would consider myself qualified for.

Did you do any math?

It might be exactly what you're looking for, but I would recommend data management for clinical research organizations. The trend is to hire people with tech backgrounds and train them in the bio stuff. The pay is good (expect to be making $100k+ after a couple of years and you're an essential member of a team (especially if you work for a small company). People treat their data management very well. Whether or not the work is interesting is more a matter of opinion. I heard someone describe it as detective work looking for clues and patterns. The cynic would say you'd spend your day double-checking for errors someone has looked over already and poring over endless lab results.

I am of the opinion that bioinformatics is the most boring thing in the world, but it's a pretty good place to start if you've got nothing else.

Still... why did you pick MIS as your major if you weren't sure what it would qualify you to do?

There were a few reasons, really, why I chose MIS. I thought it would be more in depth and hands-on than what it has been, but that's not been the case in several key courses (telecommunications especially). I also thought being involved in business courses would be more beneficial than typical science courses. And one of the other decisions was the reduced amount of math compared to the other computer majors at my university.

As far as the math that I've done, I have taken three classes that were actually part of the math department. One was called Concepts and Applications, which dealt with logic and statistics. Another was College Algebra. The last was Calculus for Business.

I've had a number of business classes that I would consider math-based and/or analytical. I've had two accounting classes, a statistics class (which I left off my earlier list of classes on accident), an operations management class, a finance class, and three economics classes.

If you're looking for something more quantitative, maybe an tech/quant analyst at an ibank? (I forget what these positions are actually called but basically you do modeling / programming to do modeling)

Edit: I found an example of what I'm talking about ... it's a Merrill position (which doesn't exist anymore because Merrill is BoA now) but I'm pretty sure other/most firms have something lke this

http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache:e1mzs-TMoGsJ:careers.ml.com/%3Fid%3D76716_79332_76756_76790_76800+merrill+lynch+technology&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us


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A little vague but yeah

University math - and I'm talking about the math for math majors kind of thing - is a totally different beast from the math you did in high school. It's actually pretty fun.

The reason most computer majors require such a heavy math courseload is because... Computer Science is really an applied mathematics degree. If an employer knows what he's looking for, and most of them do, you probably won't be able to use your degree to land an entry level developer position. Probably not even as a program manager.

Have you ever worked in bioinformatics? I have. I enjoyed it. The challenges are interesting and the work can really matter. We supported a number of research labs that were in clinical trials of all sorts of new medications, including personalized medicine.

Not "work." I'm not into "work," but I was forced to study sequence alignment research in agonizing depth. The problem of sequence alignment is really just the shortest common supersequence problem, which itself is NP-complete so it can be reduced to about a million other, way more interesting things.

Bioinformatics is one of those fields where the majority of problems can be expressed in terms of pure math, but they usually keep the biology terms in so the weeaboo premeds have a hope in hell of getting their bsc. If you're actually interested in medicine or biology it'd be a blast, though.

There's a lot more to bioinformatics than just sequence alignment.

I am aware of this fact.

Yeah... and computer science isn't programming. "If an employer knows what he's looking for" then he'd appreciate that software engineering is helped along by the developers actually knowing something about the problem domain.

Just 2 courses in VB.NET is probably going to be the actual problem landing a developer job. Not impossible as a junior dev though, and if you try and pick up a bit more programming skills then I'd say you'd be in with a fair shout.

Getting a developer job isn't really what I'm looking for. As for my programming skills, I've got more than what was taught in those two VB.NET courses, but I'm still quite a ways from being an expert programmer. Besides VB, I've done programming in C# and Java. On the web side of things, besides HTML and CSS, I've used PHP and JavaScript a fair amount. I've also used databases in all of these languages at some point in time.

If I had the time and money, I could probably expand on what I already know through some books or whatever. But what worries me about trying to get a developer position in my current state is that when I read through the Programming thread that was posted several days ago, there's a fair amount that's being discussed (especially between Jon`C and Emon) that I'm unsure about.

It's a moot point if you're not looking for a software development job, but you don't need to know what they were blathering on about to start out as a software developer.

Software development isn't really my career goal, however, it is an option if I can't find a job in another area. That way I can at least be working and gaining some experience.