Graves School Info Tech Leader

Last year, the Earl G. Graves School of Business and Management produced more African American graduates in information science and systems than any other accredited business school in the country and more than 40 percent of the African American graduates in the field in Maryland. And the department is still growing. "I think I can safely say that ours is one of the fastest growing fields on campus," says Ali F. Emdad, chairman of the information science and systems department. Ten years ago, the department had approximately 80 students majoring in information systems and averaged about eight graduates each year. Last semester there were 270 students majoring in the field. This May, the university expects to have its biggest graduating class ever at close to 50 students. "Morgan's graduates prove themselves in the industry so quickly that they become the university's best marketing tool," says Dr. Emdad. Every year, the number of corporations and institutions sending recruiters to our campus grows, says Dr. Emdad. It becomes like a snowball effect. A company such as Hewlett Packard hires one of our graduates, is impressed, and suddenly wants more. Morgan graduates become our best salespersons. Morgan graduates have gone to work for major corporations such as Hughes Information Systems, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Bell Atlantic, Bellcore, Lockheed Martin, and T. Rowe Price. Others have launched their own flourishing consulting firms, or are working for smaller, fast growth companies. Naomi Evans a `98 INSS graduate works for Impact Innovations. "I have found my experience at Impact Innovations to be very exciting and rewarding," says Evans. "My responsibilities as an IT consultant include traveling throughout the United States and abroad, deploying a military health application system developed by Impact Innovations. Rodney Williams, a `98 INSS graduate agrees with Naomi. "The best part of working at Early Morning Software is the diverse working environment and the wide range of technologies that I have been exposed to." And those that do not immediately join the workforce have obtained advanced degrees at some of the most prestigious and challenging universities in the United States. Dr. Emdad attributes the department's success to a top-notch staff and state of the art technology. Dean Thomas made a commitment early on to bring in the right people, says Dr. Emdad. A staff makes or breaks a department. We have a staff of 12 dedicated professors, interested in research, who enjoy working with students and most of whom have doctorate degrees. This past spring semester, Dr. Karen Bland's class in Telecommunications and Network Systems worked on a project to develop a website for Mr. Hiram Ammons, author of the Great Blacks in Wax Museum Activity Book. Students in Dr. Bland's class used HTML and JavaScript to create four competing websites. "At the Graves School we are dedicated to producing quality instruction by opening the classroom to the world of business," says Dr. Bland. Just as importantly, staff and students benefit from state-of-the-art technology. The McMechen building, home to the business school, has seven fully equipped computer labs, including a lab dedicated to the accounting department and one for information systems. All of the labs are fully networked and employ Windows 98 and Windows NT, says Duane K. Jackson, the network administrator assigned to the business school. This past spring, the business school also installed a Bell Atlantic teleconferencing center for distance learning capabilities. This summer, the school will install a state of the art audio/video media retrieval system to allow faculty to give multi-media presentations during lectures. "This new system will include a video server similar to the ones used by cable companies for pay-per-view to provide video on demand," says Jackson. In addition, the department works hard to keep abreast of new developments in the fast-changing information technology field. Students begin receiving programming assignments by their second year, which is relatively early in their academic careers, says Dr. Emdad. By the time they graduate, they are well versed in a number of the current programming languages, including C + +, C, HTML, JavaScript, and SQL. They also learn COBOL since many older systems were based on that older program. The curriculum also requires students to become comfortable with various operating systems, and software. According to Dr. Emdad, the focus of the INSS curriculum is on developing solutions and creating business applications using information technology.

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