undergraduate

“Engineers are faced with a very different situation in the real world, so in many cases, the engineers are ill- equipped for the first day at work.” Professor Anthony Lattanze affirmed at the conference with the theme: “Building Skills and Knowledge for the Future” at Duy Tan University on 13^th August 2009 on the occasion of Danang IT Festival 2009.

According to him, theory on computer science and software engineering is generally academic and difficult to apply into practice. Moreover, the applications in the real world are much wider than what they learnt and architected at their universities.

Thus, he presented the methods of education and training at CMU. He said “CMU has developed a unique approach to education at all levels”. Classroom theory is best illustrated through hands-on experiences in the likely environments that graduates will encounter in practice. He added that a critical factor in CMU ways is to teach students the judgment of architecting. However, “it’s extremely difficult to teach students how to judge”, he emphasized.

He said that “Because tools and technologies come & go, it’s important that we base on work on some enduring principles”. This enables graduates to quickly adapt to the realistic environment, acquire new tools and technologies in a good norm.

Professor Anthony also introduced training programs of software engineering at 4 levels at CMU including undergraduate, professional masters, PhD, and executive education. He pointed out the differences between the professional program and traditional program, and at the same time, he provided the structure, courses, and subjects in the professional program.

Besides, he gave out some orientations to set up skills and knowledge of software engineering for the Vietnamese future. According to him, the educationalist must teach students how to make judgment and balance on technology. The practicing engineers need to learn how to work in team, develop interpersonal skills, study many programming languages, etc.

The conference contributes to helping the leaders, educationalists, experts and students of software engineering have an overview of training program and methods at CMU, and enable them to open a correct direction for software engineering sector of Vietnam.