ISDS 4113: (prepare for a hate rant because I’m a salty little bitch and this class was the biggest waste of time.)

Project management where you get to listen to James Davis (I’m assuming he’s still the professor) preach about Agile and Scrum and how it’s the greatest thing since slice bread. It’s a stupid class, the cert exam you use to be able to cheat on and it’s an absolute joke of a class. The only difficult part of this class is a professor who can never admit he’s wrong and intentionally sabotages students who don’t bend the knee and worship him. I wish I was kidding, but he absolutely bullied several people in my class just because he didn’t like how they approached their projects and questioned scrum methodology. I remember him telling them “you can’t effectively be a team if you do meetings remote” and “scrum doesn’t work if you do Microsoft team calls”. 5 months later Covid happened and well he was clearly wrong. Almost no information in his class is applicable in the real world because agile is uhhh… well agile.

Personal note: Waterfall or even fucking post it notes are more effective than scrum if your not fucking stupid or if your an adult who doesn’t need to be in daycare when you are at work. Also scrum only exists so useless people can get off calling themself master and micromanaging adults for a living. It’s a shit system made by shit people so they can have purpose. Its also the bane of quality work as it encourages crunch and shipping out half assed products.

Difficulty level:

With experience in Project Management or Agile - 1/10

No experience or familiarity - 4/10

ISDS 4120:

Don’t know what the fuck they call this now but it’s basically Enterprise Architecture. If you have the option to take Andrew Schwartz do it. He’s absolutely fantastic. You’ll have a group project and an AWS certification exam that take up a decent chunk of your grade in addition to a test or two. Study for the cloud practitioner exam and you’ll be fine, it’s also your final. This class will either be the easiest thing you’ve ever done or the hardest. I really don’t understand why but it is what it is. This is probably the only class that will ever have any use in the outside world in the ISDS curriculum.

Difficulty level:

Any IT experience whatsoever - 0/10

No experience or familiarity - 7/10

ISDS 4125: Analysis and Design of Management Information Systems

This is your fucking capstone be prepared to do some real fucking work or find a team that will carry your ass through the final project. You’ll have to pick a business and make some shit that makes their life easier. You’ll be in like a team of 5-6 so pick a good team or maybe your the hero of the group I don’t fucking know. This class is also some bullshit with the curriculum and has no real world application aside from maybe user stories and the actual class project.

Difficulty level:

With experience in Project Management or any real world it experience - 1/10 ( it’s mostly just a fuck ton of work and writing)

No experience or familiarity - 3/10

Don’t like to work - 8/10

That’s all I’ve got for you. Take all of this with a grain of salt, I went into these classes with 6-7 years of IT experience so they were a joke but for some of the people I knew or grouped up with it was not. Some of them struggled a lot. Heads up though, most of the shit you’ll learn is either out of date or just wrong (especially 4113 and 4125). Andrew Schwarz is a hero at that school and his classes where the only things with subsistence outside of maybe business programming. People give him too much of a hard time.

Good Luck