This is long overdue.

MIS at Temple University has officially been ranked on the top 10 list of programs for undergrad IT.  It’s nice coming from a publication like techrepublic.com–as they actually built a set of metrics and surveyed the schools they ranked.

View the Tech Republic report (pdf).

Pictures from MIS Top 10 Celebration on Facebook

Why Fox MIS Dominated

The curriculum, the professors, the staff and administrators, the students, the alumni, the SPO (AMIS), the internships, and the post-graduation job placements all play a part in earning Temple’s MIS program a spot on the list of top 10 MIS programs in the nation!

Reviewing some of the metrics, there is no question why Fox MIS is on this list.  I can only speak from my experience, so here is what I see:

Curriculum of the IS/IT program

Firms are finding value in employees with practical business knowledge–after all, they are hiring for business needs.  The hardcore programmers that cannot work with “the end in mind”–ie the business solution–are going to be less desirable to a firm.  This day and age firms want to integrate technology to compliment their business model and to integrate business and technology firms need leaders with working knowledge of both.

Fox MIS is taught in the business school by business leaders. There are two parts to this to be considered: (1) Fox MIS students go through the business core classes–ie

• Accounting I & II,
• Finance I & II,
• Human Resources Management,
• Risk Management and Insurance,
• Management Science and Operations Management,
• Marketing;

and (2) MIS professors have nothing less than applicable business experience to relate to–each speaking from a different industry.

Fox MIS is creating a group of extremely well-rounded business leaders.

Cost value analysis for the education

Temple always wins this category. Tuition is slightly more than chump-change compared to our neighbor schools and the university presents just as much opportunity as any other school.

Co-ops  and/or internships offered in the program

Opportunity for Co-op and Internships is a core strength of the Fox School of Business.  Anyone that really tries can get a summer internship or a co-op placement.

My internship experience has been key in making my classroom learning practical and relevant.  Relating classroom material with personal experience is going to be much more effective than just reading text books.

Placement

I am pretty sure Fox MIS still has 100 percent placement for graduates.  Fox MIS is a high performance program with high expectations. And as long as our graduates maintain this work ethic employers will continue to fight each for Fox MIS graduates.

Overall “strength” of the program

This is a very ambiguous criteria from Tech Republic.  Maybe this is refering to group synergy?

In regards to strength I will say that even before this ranking was released I had no doubt in my mind that Fox MIS was one of the best.  I walked with nothing less than confidence that I would get to where I wanted to be.  If the program’s ability to instill confidence into its students is not strength, than I don’t know what strength of a program even could be.

Association of Management Information Systems (AMIS) – Temple University

AMIS is a Student Professional Organization (SPO) devoted to those interested in Management Information Systems (MIS).  Our themes include:

• running Professional Development activities (develop soft skills),
• MIS related workshops (develop hard skills),
• and bringing employers, students, alumni, staff, and faculty together for a variety of events including recruiting events, guest speakers, and networking events.

This school year I am the acting Secretary for AMIS. I manage the record keeping activities and the general information dissemination for the organization. I team directly with the following teams within the organization:

• Webmasters — This team manages site design, site enhancements and upgrades, and site support. This year our webmasters have launched the AMIS site powered by WordPress, a very powerful Content Management System (CMS). The are constantly investigating or implementing plug ins to add features to the site; examples include the following:
  • Paypal/E-commerce – Empowers site users with the ability to pay membership dues, activity fees, and make donations online
  • Calendar – Automates the event calendar as seen on the homepage.
  • Custom Forms - Create custom forms/questionnaires on the go.
  • Custom Admin – Customize every detail of user privileges in the admin console.
• Marketing — This team is fundemental in the success of AMIS’ activities; they support the organizations’ event planners–Directors of Professional Development, Networking/Community, External Relations, etc–with the skill set to distribute information throughout the organization. Marketing has been known to produce high quality email fliers, print fliers, and display cases throughout the business campus.
• Membership — AKA the organization’s database manager. Membership keeps detailed records of our events, members, meetings, attendance, and whatever else you can think of. This is crucial creating reports that are required by the university to stay in play.

http://www.temple-amis.org

AMIS at the IT Awards