The Northwestern informational session was really good. The real question is whether getting a degree in Information Systems has a promising career outlook. If I were to go the route of an IT professional, I would need to make sure that I chose the right vertical. Northwestern offers six different verticals:

- Database and Internet Technologies
- Information Systems Security
- Software Project Management and Development
- Information Systems Management
- Medical Informatics
- Information Systems

I need to do more research before choosing between Computer Science and IT. They both involve ~50k investments, so I need to make sure that the proper return is there.

At a public U with financial aid your tuition will almost be free.

http://www.govst.edu/cas/t_cas_pgm_mscs.aspx?id=614
http://www.csu.edu/macs/csproggrad.htm

Have you considered tech/IT consulting? With your background it would better leverage your thinking skills. You can pick up the necessary technical knowledge.

When you say "pick up the necessary technical knowledge" do you mean without going to school, or do you mean with going to school? If it is the former, then while that may be true, there is no way recruiters would ever give me a chance without the proper degree. Maybe some of you have had better experiences in the job market, but I have found it to be completely ruthless.

If you mean the latter, then which vertical of those I listed from Northwestern's program do you think makes an applicant (or someone with my experience) most desirable to a consulting firm? There is also the option of taking classes in each vertical rather than fully specialize.

I really believe that Computer Science offers the most well-rounded education and provides you with the most important building blocks whether you go into IT or software or anything. Comp Sci is like majoring in English or Philosophy in that it's a truly liberal art. Except graduates get jobs.

My sysadmin at work told me hiring sysadmins (i.e., IT workers) is more difficult than software engineers. However, he requires sysadmins to know how to program, amongst all the other typical duties. Again, even here, to get a straight IT job (sysadmin), I think CS prepares you best. Other majors are more like going to vocational school: what you learn will be irrelevant in 5 years. CS is timeless.

However, a lot of guys can't cut it in CS. So they drop out and go to business school. It would be preferable to go to an IT/vocational program and do well to get a tech job than to fail out of a CS program which might brand you as Teh Sucks.

IT consulting is a vast field. All those programs would be helpful. What's more important is your skills and interests. See a company like http://www.avanade.com/us/Pages/default.aspx for examples of the types of work IT consultants do. Consulting firms hire a ton of engineers, CS, and math students because they can solve problems and learn new technologies quickly. So pick a path/program that develops those skills.

It really depends on what you want to do. If you're worried about people thinking you lack IT skills upon graduation and you want to end up in development...well there's tons of Open Source projects you could contribute to while getting your MA.

If I'm hireing developers and can pick and chose I always value projects they did (aka finished code, good developers "ship") +my estimate of how well they get along with other developers highest.
IT is very much merit based in many places and quite frankly usually that's the places you want to end up in. Some places value formal education very highly but my very subjective view is that working there usually isn't great.

If you want to do non-development work an MBA might not be the worst decision. Make sure that you teach yourself some high level stuff on the side and understand technology and can make educated decisions.
SQL+a high level language like python/ruby+web stuff will put you way ahead of most business people already.

Also...a MA in CS is going to include a bunch of stuff that isn't really "practical" at first glance. You may have operating system design, algorithms and stuff that isn't really "just code stuff". Might want to look into software engineering or similar degrees.

[I work in IT and used to be responsible for hireing people to some degree at my old job]

Aside from the academic element, part of the value of going to a top school is that the best firms recruit there. For instance, if you go to college in Chicago and want to work at JP Morgan as an I-banker, it isn't hard to get an interview if you go to UChicago or Northwestern and study Economics. If you go elsewhere, you have to find a way to not get lost in the abyss of general online applications.

You should see if this is the case with UChicago's or Northwestern's CS programs. Do Microsoft/Google/Apple recruit at UChicago and not at Depaul? Given what you said, it's probably worth it for you to find out the answer to this question.

Ha well that's why I asked that question...I am trying to get answers to it. My goal isn't to work for a top company though; it's to get a solid education and build the skills necessary to always be in demand. The question is whether the brand name of the school plays a big role in that demand. There's no question top tier companies care a lot about that, but I'm not going after the top 2% of jobs...I am going after the remaining 98%.

There are a few really good and helpful responses made recently that I'll respond to later tonight. I really appreciate the feedback so far.

Your point regarding developing timeless skills is extremely imporant to me. I have been browsing through many of the IT/Programming jobs out there and writing down all of their desired skills in order to find the commonalities. Here is just a small sample of some of the languages they want you to know:

"Experience with WhiteHat Sentinel, HP Webinspect, IBM Appscanner, Cenzic Hailstorm, Acunetix, Tenable Nessus, Core Impact, Rapid7"

"Understand and utilize our tools to encourage efficient development (Ruby on Rails, Git, Cucumber, Rspec, Selenium, Capybara)."

"May have experience with Apache, Squid, HAProxy, or Akamai."

Some of these sound completely made up. Selenium and Capybara sound like diseases, Cenzic Hailstorm sounds like a video game attack move, Akamai sounds like it's from a Japanese porn, and I don't even know what to make of Squid and Cucumber. Overall, it seems unbelievably (not speaking in hyperbole here) important to learn what is required to constantly adapt. Who knows how many languages there will be 5 years from now?

I am not sold on the MBA path. I have seen many aspects of the business world, and I'm not sure if an MBA will take me in the direction I ultimately want to be. However, Isura's point regarding consulting is a good one, and I am going to look into what types of skills these jobs look for.

Your post reminds me that I need to define exactly where I want to end up once I graduate. That should be obvious, but it's difficult for me to know when I have limited experience in these fields. Who knows what I will excel at and like/dislike?

In searching for Software Engineer Jobs and IT jobs, these are some of the commonalities in skills I have found:

1. SQL Database Knowledge
2. General Database Knowledge: MS SQL, Oracle, Postgre SQL, My SQL
3. General web-related Technology: HTTP, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
4. Computer Science degree or "related field"
5. Systems Administration skills
6. Unix/Linux

I'll update that list as I continue to research. Maybe it will be helpful for others.

For business school name is more important since there are often 100's (1000's) of business graduates vs a few dozen Engineering. At the state college I'm attending I know a number of people that have interviewed and/or gotten jobs at Xerox, IBM, Google, Pixar, Microsoft, Boeing and Raytheon.

Awesome, that is great to hear.

Selenium is a (great) testing tool, Rapid7 is a pentest site, Nessus is a vulnarability scanner etc.
My guess is that was some sort of security related job?

That's a good list. I will add

7. One OOP language (Java, C#, C++, etc)

In general focus on concepts and choose 1 platform/technology to master. Eg. web learn PHP or Python w/ Django or MS SQL server + .net. It's better to know 1 really well then 3 of them vaguely.

Also technologies that are very hot right now are parallel computing, cloud computing, and mobile development. It's useful to know about networking, concurrency, database systems (their design and implementation, not only SQL), and mobile hardware. That will open up more possibilties.