Summary of the Article
The article by Mathew Wilson, who was a student at Alabama University at the time of writing, is a wakeup call to a computer science majors and a possible invitation to all those looking for promising careers. Wilson (2017) narrates ho professor Lawrence Birnbaum at age 14 had a gut feeling about computers being the future. By that time, the professor had difficulty in locating a workstation to work on, that was in the late 60s. Just as the professor of computer science predicted, today there are more jobs than candidates can fill in the vacancies.
Graduates in the field of study are having a time of their lives as they select the organization of their choice in comparison to other fields here the graduates select what comes their way. From the article, the writer poses a rhetorical question enquiring why the best field with growth and employment potential has few student graduates (Wilson, 2017). The writer goes ahead and supports his article with statistics from different sources such as careercast.com, rjmetrics.com, Computer Science Zone, Narrative Science, GeekWire.com, and Fortune, among other sources.
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Use of Descriptive Statistics
Descriptive statistics have been simplified for the ease of non-statistical compliant readers' comprehension. For instance, the writer makes use of measures of frequency such as percent and frequency, where he cites the percentage of data scientists globally to be 52%. He proceeds to note that the majors in computer science increment were by 2015 was 95% after only four years. Moreover, statisticians will note that Wilson (2017) uses descriptive statistics in quoting open positions on LinkedIn. According to the writer, the frequency of open positions for data scientists, software engineers, and physical therapists were 8,916, 72,800, and 74,900, respectively. Furthermore, the writer quotes the frequency of students who graduated in computer information systems and computer science with majors to be 26,200 and 16,870, respectively.
Application of the Article to a Computer Science Major
This information is critical to a major in computer science as it motivates them to work hard on their studies with the knowledge that there are numerous job opportunities than they can fill. Thus, it helps them focus with a field of specialty without fear of finding any job postings. The computer science industry is a gold mine, as cited by Wilson (2017), where companies that are tech giants have contributed multi-million dollars to sponsor students in the field. Companies such as Google, Microsoft, Zillow, and Amazon among other tech companies have raised an approximated $90million for a computer science and engineering construction.
Why the Article Used Data
First and foremost, for any writer to gain credit is to substantiate their article with relevant data that will support the article as being authentic. For instance, just writing that the number of students taking computer science at U.C. Berkeley has increased would give no credit to the article as there would be many questions that are unanswered. But adding that the number has risen to 2,546 from 1,133 adds a lot of weight on the credibility of the article. This is because the internet is filled with numerous sources of information that is credible as well as a plethora of cites with unreliable information (Horton, 2016). Furthermore, most readers are after content that is useful and informational, and as such, the use of data in this article makes it not only informational but also reliable. Thus, readers can accurately use it as a source of reference or cite from it as the data indicates that the content has been well researched by the writer.
References
Horton, R. (2016). Offline: Data sharing—why editors may have got it wrong. The Lancet, 388(10050), 1143.
Wilson, M. (2017, February 15). Calling all computer science majors: jobs are waiting for you. Retrieved August 17, 2019, from https://www.usatoday.com/story/college/2017/02/15/calling-all-computer-science-majors-jobs-are-waiting-for-you/37427051/
