How does Penn State's IST undergraduate program measure up to similar programs offered in foreign schools? To find out one perspective, we met with Varun Adibhatla (candidate for master's in IST '08), who received his bachelor's degree in Information Technology from the Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Technology in Hyderabad, India. The biggest difference is in the infrastructure--not just the state-of-the-art facilities we have available here at the College of ...

Senator Ted Stevens made internet history when he called labeled it a "series of tubes" back in 2006, but what a difference two years make. You can see the way technology influences society in this year's presidential race, where all the candidates remaining have harnessed the power of the Internet like never before, a fact which has undoubtedly given much fodder for IST 110. Presidential longshot Ron Paul made ...

This is the second part in a four-part overview of the College of IST. See Part 1 of "I'm (Mostly) Self-Taught." Even if you have the skills to get going in the real world and get an IT job right out of high school, it's probably worth your while and tuition dollars to get that BS in IST. Since IST is the love-child of business and IT, some valuable ...

Hello fellow IST and SRA junkies, I hope you're all doing well on this wonderful April afternoon. I know many of you have probably heard the term "social graph" tossed around. An Exeter-alum, Harvard drop-out popularized the term, although who's to say who actually came up with it? You might know him, his friends call him Zuck, a bit more than four years ago, he started a small social website ...

Several IST students and alumni have taken offense to my previous comment regarding the IST Students vs. Alumni and Mentor Breakfast events. I would like to clarify my comment and apologize for all offense caused. I did not in any way mean to detract from the hard work and effort put into the events by the leaders of the IST Alumni Society and the students responsible ...

It's been about a week since the launch of IST Building. You know you are doing something right when you start receiving hate mail and cease and desist orders. Regardless, we are continuing to do our best to drive forward with our goal of providing an alternative media outlet for our College of IST. You have to keep in mind that each of us have reputations on the ...

This is the first post in a four-part overview of Penn State University's College of IST. IST's subject matter, especially its technical aspects, often falls in the realm of new technology. Curricula usually are left behind as languages and programming paradigms shift; Penn State's Comp Sci recently dropped its FORTRAN class, a language not seen in any modern application. Most skills in IST can be self-taught: many IST students, in ...

I recently came across a startup called Xobni that and found it quite interesting. Xobni, inbox spelled backwards, is an Outlook plug-in that radically changes to the way people interact with their email. Xobni is currently in beta, but if you put a link to their website in your blog or email five friends and trick them into registering, the company promises to give you a spot on ...

This is a question I've discussed many times with fellow IST majors. Do we really need a good amount of programming skills? Computer science and computer engineering majors are for the most part more heavily drilled in programming then we as IST majors are, but all of my internships have revolved heavily around my ability to program. I work for IBM currently and my manager once joked to ...

Now, I haven't been in the program that long, but I have noticed a few things occurring in IST classes and I am sure SRA classes are the same way. I look at students inside a class and I see people playing games on the computers, checking through Facebook, or even falling asleep in class. Now, given that there is bound to be at least one person doing ...