Making Grads Who Know How To Code

Making Grads Who Know How To Code by: Naomi Nishihara on January 03, 2017 | 0 Comments Comments 2,246 Views January 3, 2017Miami University Farmer School of Business.The Miami University Farmer School of Business has changed its core curriculum to include coding. Beginning this year, all first-year undergraduates studying business must  take a course in Javascript and SQL (Structured Query Language). While coding classes have been  available to Farmer School business students for years, very few took them, Dean Matthew Myers says. But learning a coding language can train students to think computationally to solve business problems, Myers says, and that fact prompted Farmers  curriculum change. â€Å"What we’ve discovered, he says, is that coding really has value across all our different majors, and even into our MBA program.John Benamati, professor and chair of information systems and analytics at the Farmer School, says staff had  been having conversations for s ome time about how to give students a managerial understanding of programming. The conversations, he says, were mostly driven by the entrepreneurship division because Farmer  students expressed a desire  to work on the business side of tech startups. But another big reason for the change happened this summer, Benamati says, when the CEO of General Electric, Jeff Immelt, wrote a LinkedIn post in which he pronounced that knowledge of coding is now  necessary for new hires. GE ONLY HIRES  B-SCHOOL GRADS WHO CODEFarmer School students at work on their laptops. Courtesy photoThe reality, says Jim Fowler, CIO at GE, is that  for the past five years the industrial giant  hasn’t hired a business school grad who didnt have  at least basic coding skills. Though â€Å"it’s not a requirement,† Fowler  says, â€Å"it’s the default we see coming in the door. Whether you’re in financial services or in a large-scale industrial like GE, data is the new currency. Turning data into decision-making power is what makes people’s success.† Fowler says that across the board at GE, employees  from engineering, HR, legal, and other departments are writing code and developing models to solve problems. â€Å"That ability to deal with data coming from multiple sources — there is not one function in the company where that is not applicable,† he says. â€Å"It’s a game-changer.† He adds that new hires coming in with any modern-day coding language are in a good position. â€Å"Coming in with Java, coming in with some R (another programming language), any modern-day language will give you the ability to learn more languages, Fowler says. What we’ve seen in the people we’ve recruited in the last five years is that they’re able to pick up new languages in a matter of weeks. So if you have one coming out of college, you’ll be able to pivot to the right one for the job.† EMPLOYERS WANT COMPUTATIONAL SKILLSFarmer School of Business Dean Matthew Myers. Courtesy photoDean Myers says the catalyst  for Farmers core change  was a combination of Immelts  LinkedIn post and feedback from other employers. â€Å"We were running into folks at firms who were moving away from their traditional MBA hires and moving toward undergraduates, and they were articulating their need for computational skills,† Myers  says. Most Farmer School undergraduates have no experience with coding when they arrive, Benamati says, so the required class is an introductory course. Students do reading beforehand, and then bring their laptops to class. The first half of the class is  spent covering the material in the reading and giving examples; in the second half, students write code. â€Å"We put up examples and say, ‘Write a piece of code that does this,’† Benamati says.ONCE THEY CAN DO IT, THEY LIKE ITThis year, half of Farmers  incoming fres hmen took the course in the fall semester, and the other half are taking  it this spring. So far, Benamati says, student response has surprised him: Those  who came in without prior coding experience — who hadn’t wanted to take the class in the first place — ended up really liking it. â€Å"Once they saw that they could do it, they liked it, he says. Never having been forced to try it, they never would have known.DONT MISS JOB PLACEMENT AT THE BEST UNDERGRADUATE BUSINESS PROGRAMS and THE MOST POPULAR UNDERGRAD STORIES OF 2016 Page 1 of 11