This has been my experience at the age of 27:
1.) The strength of the degree depends entirely upon the school you attend and the instructors teaching the courses.
2.) Getting interviews is the easy part…
Back after I graduated in 2007 with an IT degree, I had been employed by my university as an intern. My responsibilities for the last 3 years of the internship consisted of providing IT work for local non-profits. As you can imagine, the work was a pain at times, but mostly because of the idiot clients we had to deal with.
In this internship, we were allowed to choose “specialties.” Mine boiled down to web design and development, and as such, I was usually charged with creating websites using some sort of “painted CMS.”
It was really fun! I learned a lot about servers, web standards, PHP programming, etc. It was one of the most memorable times of my life.
Fast-forward to graduation and it all comes apart. Based on the good words from a business instructor I had (in a systems analysis class) as well as some past co-interns that were already on-board, I found a way to get a job with a big time student loan company directly upon graduation day–I thought my life was laid out before me! I was going to finally have enough cash to get a ring for my girl, buy a house, get a new whip… Life was good.
I lasted a year at that **** hole.
The job itself was pure mainframe hell (i.e. - COBOL-2, JCL, disgruntled megalomaniac supervisors, manuals that weighed approximately 5 pounds, in-house training classes that were as effective as Bush was with increasing employment in the States, etc.–I’m talking NIGHTMARE) and what exactly made that employer believe I was a good fit is beyond me, especially keeping in mind that my background consisted of cross-browser compatibility and Photoshop CS:2. My old CS prof always had rhetoric about older COBOL developers going through a mass exodus of retirement. I guess the company I got the job with was panicking… Who knows?
Anyway, ever since that PTSD experience, I’ve had a rather inconvenient life and it’s pushed me back to school for a masters degree in something completely outside of both programming and IT (education). Don’t get me wrong, I still use what I learned with the PHP and web design from my IT program, even in many of my current classes, but unfortunately, it’s been my experience (as well as that of many of my classmates who majored in CS) that the school / program we all had did little to prep us for the big, bad “real world.” Even with that company I mentioned set aside, many of us were still lost in many things… Truly sad.
The biggest challenge people seem to have when going through school is determining what it is they wish to do and the horrifying irony is that many people hired to help these young adults seem to think that this is abnormal at the age of twenty-something… There’s no shame in it at all! People who blab about knowing what they wish to do at the age of 18 or even 27 (ha) are naive. If you think you do know what you want to do in this age range, then hey, more power to you. But keep in mind that it becomes more convincing when you have some instructor or supervisor staring at you as you admit your fondness of .NET crap. Just saying…
You just have to keep pushing forward and praying for the best possibility while keeping in mind that no matter what you studied in school, chances are you’ll start off doing something completely unrelated to your interests (assuming you even get a job in the same field even–of which, you can then consider yourself to be very lucky).
If you find something your passionate about, and it seems possible to get a job from it, then start working on it like crazy or else go to some school to learn more about it and go from there… Nobody in the real world gives a rat’s ass if you have a CS, IT, or IS imprint stamped on your sheepskin. It’s all about what you know how to do in the least amount of time because at the end of the day, that’s what brings a smile to that fat jack-off’s face who keeps wiping his ass with your paycheck each week.