[ILUG] crossover postgraduate IT courses

[Stephen Horgan]

Thomas Bibby wrote:

>Hello,
>
>I have a (possibly very cheekily off-topic) question about 'crossover'
>postgraduate IT courses.
>
>My sister graduates from an arts undergrad course in UCC (Italian +
>Maths) this summer.  She took comp. sci as a subject (which she really
>enjoyed) but had to give it up because of subject restrictions.
>
>She's looking at some postgrad cert/diploma courses in IT, and I was
>wondering if anyone had any opinions as to the usefulness of these. 
>In this context I'm talking about:
>
>1. Teaching general principles rather than specifics, preferably
>within an open source context, or at least not a college equivalent of
>"dot net for dummies".
>
>2. A reasonable chance of employability at the end of it.  By that I
>mean some chance of getting a job provided she has a reasonable
>portfolio of projects from both within and outside of her course, a
>job that will be enough to get her started with a career in IT.
>
>I couldn't find any reviews of courses on the web that approximately
>fit the two criteria above, I did find a discussion from the CLUG list
>from 2000 but it focused on undergraduate courses and I presume things
>have changed somewhat since then.
>
>Personally I do have some doubts about the utility of these type of
>courses, but hey, she's an arts student and she's going to have to do
>some sort of course to get employable, and it seems like most
>employers do require qualifications of some sort to start off on the
>career ladder (this seems to apply across all disciplines).
>
>The reason I'm taking so much interest in her future education is I'm
>going to cover some of her fees...
>
>If anyone has any useful information or links to hand about the
>usefulness of these courses, or a more appropriate forum that this
>question could be posted to, or any general opinions on this, I'd
>really appreciate it.
>
>Profuse apologies if this is considered to be off-topic (but I accept
>that grovelling won't make this post flame-retardant...).
>
>Thanks,
>
>Thomas Bibby.
>  
>
What about the Graduate Diploma in IT at DCU? I'm half way through it, I 
find it a good course with a broad range of topics.

http://www.dcu.ie/prospective/deginfo.php?classname=GDF&originating_school=40