[AISWorld] What high school students thing IT professionals do.

[Walden, Eric]

Kevin Harmon (a PhD student) and I recently surveyed 800 college bound US high school students from across the country and we had an open ended question that read "what do IT professionals do?"

I thought I would share the gist of the responses because one thing many universities really need (except Minnesota [Good job Gedas, Alok and everyone]) is more undergraduate students to choose MIS, and college bound high school students are the people who are choosing majors.  So here is what a sample of those people respond to the question of: "what do IT professionals do?"

The most common answers fell into the Junk category which included everything from "Technition" to "They do a lot of work" to "Tippity Tap on computers" to "To be quite honest, I have no idea."   A lot of these answers seem to be of the form "sit at computers" or "Stay on computer all day" or "Work on computer all day long."

The second most common thing people said was something like "Store, retrieve, and transmit data with computers."

The third most common thing was teaching as exemplified by "Teach about technology and how its useful in life" or "The teach u about computers and other technologys stuff".

Then would be something like library science, with comments like "They help others in gathering information in technology such as news articles online such like that." Or "they find information in detail on the computer in websites".

Then it was a tie between programming software (e.g  "They do coding work on computers for sites and games") and technology support (e.g. "They are like the tech people that help fix everything" or "They work with computers fix them and learn to build good ones and they know a lot about computers").  The last category was researching technology.  Some examples here are "Review technology", "Study technology" or "Study the use of computerized systems".

In sum, about 1/3 of high school students seem to have an idea of what IT professionals do, about half have no idea, and the rest think they either teach computer classes or spend all day looking things up on the internet.


Eric Walden
Director of the Texas Tech Neuroimaging Institute
James C. Wetherbe Professor
Rawls College of Business
703 Flint Avenue
Texas Tech University
806-834-1925
eric.walden at ttu.edu<mailto:eric.walden at ttu.edu>
http://ericwalden.net<http://ericwalden.net/>