Spring Break!

Well it has finally came upon me to spend some free time during Spring Break....well I thought that was the case anyway...

One of the strengths of the MIS program is the large use of group projects to get the full systems development life cycle really burned into the minds of the students. This semester I am taking the Management of IT class that has a project based on Business Process Reengineering. The project that my group is working on is an online interface for a local small dog breeding company that deals with business nationwide. Unfortunately that means that I get to spend my Spring Break doing PHP code to develop the backend for the system. I know this may sound boring to some but honestly for myself I see it as a puzzle and will probably entertain me over the break.

The department hosted a lunch for the Full-Time MIS students this past week to talk about graduation as well as internship possibilities. This year there are many great internships for the students from chose from to help build their resumes as well as gain needed experience. I can personally say that I have learned more in the past 6 months at Colgate-Palmolive working hands on with SAP projects than I could ever hope to get during regular class periods. That's not to say that having a strong foundation for the SAP system wasn't crucial to my success, in all honesty SAP is a very scary interface for someone that hasn't ever dealt with it. Luckily the format that UA uses to teach SAP to students uses real world interactions with the system and you actually run a complete business in a controlled environment. It is much better to break something on a test learning system than on a global SAP implementation...

Just to give you some ideas of the places some of us are working here are a list of some of my classmates and their internships, I will list more as I get details from them.

Sichen Dong - Hersey's
Adam Harrel - Campbell's
Myself - Colgate-Palmolive

Again these are just a few of the individuals working in outside internships. As the summer rolls near we will hopefully all be able to find outside internship for our class courses and gain some wonderful experience. Keep watching for updates on the jobs and projects we are working on.

Hello World!

Well everyone, this is a start to a blog I am creating to hopefully give future MIS students out there an idea of what the program is like from a Full-Time MIS student. My name is Zach Steelman and I started the Full-Time MIS program at the University of Arkansas in August of 2009 and will be graduating in July of 2010. I finished my Bachelor's degree in MIS at Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, Oklahoma in 2009 and started my Master's program directly afterwards.

One of the driving reasons for chosing the MIS program at UA was the strength of their connections to the corporate world in NWA due to the large number of vendors in the area serving Wal-Mart. After starting the program I was able to grab an internship at Colgate-Palmolive in Rogers, AR working for their Wal-Mart support team. As you go through alot of the classes here at UA you will see many different stories and references to real world cases that deal with vendors in the local area. This real world model helps tremendously when trying to understand the uses and concepts that are taught in the class.

I am opening this blog up to allow anyone out there that is possibly thinking about the program or has applied and would like to get a different view of the program the ability to ask me via email and I will try give, to the best I can, my opinion of the program. I feel that this program has opened up amazing opportunities to myself as well as some of the great things that my friends at UA have accomplished as well. I will try this week and get some pictures and information of my fellow classmates and their Graduate Assistantships/Internships to show the unique positions that the program allows for their students.