CMSC131 Internship Experience

Improved Essays
But what does the real world look like? This question is so ambiguous that it has become a canned question that stumps some interviewers. Based on my three internship experiences (though diverse across location and industry), a more realistic answer of what a software engineer does instead of just reading a spec and working with teammates from a solid 9-5 (or 10-6) is this. The engineer gets in the office, opens Outlook, and proceeds to get inundated by emails sent while he was eating dinner or waking up. These are typically emails such as “the team has reviewed your code and it’s been approved for a merge with the main version of the program” or “the recent merge involving your code has caused the entire service to collapse, we’ve rolled back …show more content…
Obviously not, how is a student supposed to experience the simultaneous joy and horror of those morning emails? These stresses of such a compacted and large scale project are currently not emulated in mainstream courses at the University of Maryland. There is one course, CMSC435: Software Engineering, which covers several of the more important parts of what is expected, however it is an elective (a small one, with only one section), and thus will not be taken by the majority of graduating Computer Science students. This is quite concerning, as working in a group is not interpreted by the University as a major …show more content…
Because it is not a Limited Enrollment Program (LEP), any student is able to take at least the introductory courses and there is no bound on the population of CS students. This sudden growth has left faculty somewhat unprepared to accommodate with a lack of professors and an increased visibility of if its program.
One of the more recent developments in the north east corner of the campus is the construction of the Brendan Iribe Center for Computer Science and Innovation. Set to open in 2018, the building is a 215,600 gross square feet center signifying the increased collaboration between the Department of Computer Science and the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMD). The center includes some innovative additions, including collaborative classrooms, which are mobile spaces where students are encouraged to work and discuss topics with one another. These innovative additions also include a virtual reality lab along with a makerspace akin to Startup Shell (an on campus startup incubator) hopes to drastically improve the educational standard at the University of Maryland. This growth comes at a cost,

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