Our Mission for the IT Program

The goal of the program is to enable any interested student to confidently employ IT, and to secure an intellectual platform from which to develop capacity to innovate, using IT in his or her field. At base, the point of the program is to combine the myriad strengths of this great university to expand knowledge in information technology.

We believe that the precise requirements for an appropriate IT education should vary across disciplines and students. However, promoting this tailored IT fluency for all students is increasingly important and will favorably affect the intellectual, social, and economic base of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

I think the thing you have done here with the IT Minor is phenomenal... it shows real insight and foresight in terms of where the economy and where society is going.

-- Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer

Faculty from across the disciplines administer the Program and teach its classes, ensuring that UMass addresses the needs of students across the curricula. UMass faculty already apply IT in such disciplines as English, public policy , dispute resolution, natural resource conservation, art, journalism, and nursing, to name just a few. The IT Program consolidates this expertise into opportunities—most notably our IT Minor—for all students to study IT in a form that is relevant to their interests and needs. For faculty, the Program promotes opportunities for cross-campus IT collaboration in teaching, research, and outreach.

 

Looking towards the Future

We live immersed in information, and the role it plays in organizations has never been more critical. Information Technology (or IT for short) helps us gather, analyze, communicate, and make sense of this information. IT infuses much of what we do, has already reshaped many fields, and will continue to have a profound effect on our society.

The UMass Amherst IT Program sees IT as aninterdisciplinary field of study. In many ways, IT is the junction between traditionally technical disciplines like computer science, engineering, and information systems and the entire array of other disciplines.

At UMass the deliberately broad curriculum will help you harness the opportunities IT presents in your own field. To leverage the power of IT in a discipline, you must understand the technology and that discipline to which it is applied. At UMass Amherst, IT students pursue a major discipline of their choice and complement that study with an IT Minor. The IT Minor curriculum includes courses on technologies and technical capabilities and courses that focus on the application of IT in particular disciplines. Some courses turn the lens around and apply knowledge gained from diverse disciplines across campus—Law, Economics, communication Art, History to name a few—toward IT, so that students can better understand and manage information in society and their lives. This, in a nutshell, defines IT at UMass Amherst: a fusion of IT and other disciplines in an effort to better understand each.

 

Program History

The UMass Amherst Information Technology Workforce Task Force was formed in 1998 by faculty and staff of the Amherst campus who were members of a President's Office Information Technology Workforce Development Task Force, established to foster linkages between the UMass system and the state's key industries. The UMass Amherst Task Force expanded to include representatives from a number of academic units, including the social sciences, and the humanities and fine arts. At the suggestion of Dean Joseph Goldstein of the College of Engineering, the group took up the subject of IT education at the undergraduate level.

In Fall 1999, UMass Amherst convened a two-day conference and workshop of business, government, and academic leaders to discuss the IT labor shortage. The goal of the conference was to lay the groundwork for a UMass response. See: "Formulating a UMass Response to the Information Technology Labor Shortage."

A short time later, a Curriculum Committee of the IT Task Force formed to sketch out a preliminary IT curriculum for the campus.

On October 13, 2000, some 120 UMass Amherst faculty and staff collected in the Campus Center to focus details of an IT curriculum: who should be involved, what should be taught, what links needed to be formed across the campus in order to move the program forward. The day-long program, sponsored by the Provost, ended with a first request for faculty proposals under the CITI program. By Spring 2001, 20 courses had been developed.

One highlight of the October 2000 workshop was a keynote address by Dr. Cheryl Harris, a UMass alum active in the high-tech sector. While IT programs in institutions around the country have begun with technical roots, Dr. Harris argued that the future of IT requires an even broader approach -- one consistent with the breadth, traditions, and culture of UMass Amherst.