Susan Bonzi, the director of the iSchool undergraduate program at Syracuse University, shared state of that program with us: its history, structure, and challenges.
About the program
Syracuse University is considered on of the “pioneers” of the Information School movement. Started in 1989, the undergraduate program is a 4-year program in information management and technology. Peak enrollment during the “dot com” era was at 600+ undergraduates. Current enrollment hits the 450 mark. (Students enter the 4-year program once they start school as opposed to the UW system where iSchool undergrads are juniors and seniors only.)
Some lists
The program consists of 120 credits:
- 40 for Information Management and Technology
- 36 for Arts and Sciences
- 21 for Skills
- Math/Language
- Communication (3 writing & 1 presentation)
- Computer Programming
- 23 General Electives
There are five concentrations
- Web Design and Management
- Database Management
- Telecom & Network Management
- Project Management
- Information Security
- (and more, soon)
Topics covered include
- Lots of technology
- Management concepts
- Information policy
- Users and user behavior
- Issues
- Research (a little)
- Theory (”not at all”)
Challenges
- Freshmen who enter the program often accepted it as an alternative major and have not bought into the value of an information school degree (The percentage of these kinds of students is from 50% to 80% of the entering class)
- Undergraduates require a different teaching style than for Masters or PhD students
- Faculty need to be good at that particular style
Themes
Susan emphasized the practical or “professional” perspective of the program. Namely, the students are being prepared to get jobs. She points out that this is the primary motivator for students (and their parents). This, she points out, is in contrast to the “academic” nature of the PhD program and the faculty. Research and theory is not the primary goal, instead it is practical knowledge and marketable skills. When pressed about what she meant by there being no theory in the undergraduate curiculum, she clarified a bit. First, there were no purely theoretical classes such as, “The theoretical foundations of Information Science” — the students were not exposed to readings such as Buckland (Information as Thing) or topics like Value-Sensitive Design. However, what she might call “applied theory”, was taught in classrooms. Only what theory was necessary to equip students to do their job was taught.
In a similar vein, when she was asked about undergraduate research, she noted that a few students worked with professors on their research projects, but that this was not a very common case. Unlike the UW program, no students conducted research projects on their own.
*As a side note, the professors at Syracuse had this advice to give when employing undergraduate researchers:
- Screen carefully
- Train adequately
- Provide clearly defined tasks
- Give explicit instructions
- Involve them from the beginning to encourage ownership
- Use masters & PhD students to help guide them
Final note
Despite the differences between the UW and the Syracuse programs, it appears that both are similarly successful in producing well-paid alumni with the same set of jobs (Susan’s list of alumni job titles matched the UW list). In the future, they want to augment their program with topics like gaming and much needed emphases like ethics.
