My Coursework in MIS
As an Management Information Systems major, I have been able to learn about and experience a wide variety of courses that help guide me down the path of becoming a vital asset to my future company in the business world. Some of the MIS courses that I have taken so far at Temple are Cyberspace & Society, Information Systems in Organizations, Data Analytics, and Data-Centric Application Development. Within each of these courses, they have all taught me a great deal of information as well as provided me with a wide range of knowledge to take away that have sparked interests in my career as well as help me prepare for my future in the business world.
Cyberspace & Society was the first course that I had taken as a student at Temple University that was geared towards the MIS world. In this class I learned about everything that goes into a computer as well as how each of the components operate separately. This course also taught me how to protect myself from viruses and malware through the use of techniques and precautionary actions. Not only did I learn about how a computer works, but I also learned about the different types of businesses that are available with an online presence and how they work. Lastly, this course taught me how to use Adobe Dreamweaver to create my own website. We had to start from scratch in order to create a website that revealed a specific interest of ours. Within this project, we not only needed to know how to do the simple task of adding a picture for instance, but we also learned how to completely edit and modify the style, format, appearance, and functionality of our website. This relates to my career interest in the sense that as I grow older, my goal is to start up my own business. As it is very obvious to see, the business world has been and will continue to grow exponentially in its online presence. In turn, knowing how to protect my business as well as the information that is being run through it will help me expand my business and become more successful.
The second MIS course that I had taken was Information Systems in Organizations. Within this course, we learned about the Information Systems process and how they are connected to the Information Technology aspect of the business. This means that throughout the semester we learned how to collect, manipulate, and disseminate data in order to provide feedback to the other components of a business. The main topics that we learned about were Swim Lane Diagrams as well as ERD Diagrams. We were taught how to read a certain scenario, collect the necessary data and classify them (i.e. entities, attributes, and relationships), and from there we would create the diagrams explaining the complete relationships between the entities as well as how they interacted with separate fields in the business. This is a very good skill for me to have as an MIS major in the business world due to the fact that I will be needing to understand how and what the most efficient way is to obtain the information or products that we will need to run our business to its fullest extent. In this course, we were also taught about the enterprise systems (ERP’s) and how they function as well as the correct way to initiate the decision making process when making real world decisions. One of the more intriguing concepts we learned about in this class was the use of SAP. We had to conduct a series of set instructions in order to make the SAP system perform the actions that we had commanded and make sure the system was running smoothly with no errors. Lastly, we learned a lot about real world events about technology and how businesses are adapting, or failing, in this constantly changing business model. This helped connect to our Data Analytics challenge where we had to create a visual format of our choice, and be able to attractively, yet descriptively, inform people about a certain real world problem that is occurring today. All of these skills and projects that we conducted in this course will help me be able to understand the business process down to each of the separate components of it as well as relay information to consumers or other businesses in the most powerful way possible.
The third MIS course I have taken at Temple is Data Analytics. In this course we have learned about how to implement the ERD diagrams we had learned about, into more descriptive real world situations by analyzing data more in-depth. This requires us to determine the specific relationships each entity has with one another and how they correlate to the rest of the process. This also poses the challenge of how to relay this information to a higher authority of the business we are in, which means compressing a multitude of detailed information into an easily understandable chart that displays this information. This skill is very important in my future career because in order to make myself as valuable to a company as I can, I will need to know exactly how each of the separate business components operate as well as how the effect each other in the long run due to the choices they make. It is also important because, like I had mentioned before, I would like to run my own company. This would entail knowing the most efficient and economically smart way to go about the decision making process as well as being able to handle some of these real life situations with my own business.
The fourth and most recent MIS course I am taking at Temple is Data-Centric Application Development. I can honestly say that although this is one of the most rigorous and challenging courses I have taken so far, it is by far the most interesting. In this course we are learning how to design websites through the use of HTML, CSS, and PHP code. Many of the assignments we have had so far require us to create certain tables, charts, and forms for sites. Not only do we have to understand how to incorporate these functions in our code, but we also have to know how to start from scratch and design our own. This includes determining the format, language, and content of the website so that the processor is able to read our inputs and generate the commands we have explicitly described. We also have learned how to style our pages on our site through he use of CSS and how we can use the code we write to put it into action for each individual page on our site. Lastly, we have learned how to detect specific errors on a web page, these may be the cause of the site not operating the way it is supposed to or having the attributes on the page not work correctly, and in turn modify them to the correct code in order for it to run smoothly. This course and the work within it has shown to be such a useful and necessary skill to have as an MIS major in the business world. Not only will we have to know about code in our careers as an MIS major, but we will also need to know how to communicate with the people in charge of this, such as the IT people, and understand the problems that are occurring on our sites for the business. I never thought that I would be interested in coding, but it is like you are learning an entirely different language that to other people may seem terrifying, but for me, I have grown to be able to look at it as a challenge that I am thrilled about tackling.