ALEX CLAUFF
Edgewood College, Class of 2012
Bachelor of Science in Computer/Business Information Systems
How I Decided on my Major
I chose to pursue the CIS/Business major after taking a general computer class my freshman year. I enjoy working with computers (and always have, even in middle school and high school).
While at Edgewood I Learned
The most interesting thing I have learned over my college career is learning programming languages and finding out what you can do with them. For example, I developed Edgewood's School of Nursing website (before the College website remodel), using similar jQuery features Facebook implements.
Overall, the most important thing I have learned is to teach myself. The CIS department is structured in a "there are no boundaries" sort of way. If you want to find a different way around something, and add features to a project, you can.
In the first two years, it can feel like a lot of annoying book work, but it's worth the headaches. By junior year, you apply what you've learned, and create things. We have developed static websites, interactive calendar systems, and web-based databases – everything we create is for someone who will hopefully use it after we depart from the project. Whether it is for a non-profit organization, the school, or oneself, we go through the same process and apply everything that we have learned from our previous classes into the project.
I’m now able to take everything that I've learned and apply it to one project, which is what I'm currently working on. I am using PHP and MySQL as the server side code to connect to a database I have created. HTML, CSS, jQuery and JavaScript are being used as the front-end languages, delivering an elegant look for the end user. The finished product will be a CIS alumni database to track alumni contact information, where they currently work, etc.