North Carolina Central University (NCCU) is USA’s first public liberal arts institution founded for African-Americans.
NCCU maintains a commitment to a student body that is diverse in race and other socioeconomic qualities. And its mission,
in part, is to "increase the academic and professional skills of its students and faculty". In the past two
years Prof. Cameron Seay has done much to achieve that university goal.
This effort began in the Spring 2006, when Prof. Seay (assisted by IBM Ambassadors Rich Baek and Lowell Tieszen)
offered NCCU's first mainframe computing course, Introduction to Enterprise Systems. Using IBM System z as the platform,
it contains both concepts and lab components to give students hands-on experience with the computing environment
used in many large companies. This course met with instant success, has since been offered every semester, and is growing
in popularity.
From this simple starting point, Prof. Seay has continued to expand his own skills and those of his colleagues,
while finding opportunities to enhance NCCU students' technical education. In 2006, NCCU received an IBM Shared University
Research grant to purchase a state-of-the-art IBM BladeCenter server, and in May 2007, Prof. Seay received an IBM
Faculty award to focus on large systems education, autonomic computing, and blade-centered virtualization.
He has also participated in the IBM Summer Faculty seminar on Enterprise Systems in Poughkeepsie, NY and
he will be bringing two additional faculty members with him this year.
In August 2007, Cameron was invited to be a guest presenter in the IBM Academic Initiative System z session
"Head of the Class: Educators Perspectives on Mainframe Education" at the SHARE conference in San Diego.
Impressed with SHARE, Prof. Seay returned to the conference in February 2008, except this time,
he rented a van and drove 10 of his students from North Carolina to the event in Orlando, FL.
Attending the conference, left to right: John Olulo, MBA student; Mike Todd, IBM; Jerome
Pottinger, CIS student; Paul Bennett, CIS student; Cameron Seay; NCCU professor; Nequay Oliver, CIS student;
Felicia Morris, CIS student; Jovanna Foreman, CIS student; Jameka Little, CIS student; Jariba Dawkins, CIS student;
Lorenzo Baxter, CIS student; Ed Prather MBA student; Kathy Pfeiffer, IBM.
Together they attended numerous sessions and visited the Technology Exchange Expo where they met with 100+ leading
professionals who work on enterprise solutions. Prior to their visit, Prof. Seay gave his students an assignment
to reach out to the younger industry professionals in the mainframe community and the students were then able
to meet them in person at SHARE. Lorenzo Baxter, a CIS student, thought "the tips and skills
given to the attendees made a difference in seeing the big picture". The value of getting the
'big picture' was also heard from other students, along with comments about SHARE like "the best thing",
"cool", and "superb".
Results:
Prof. Seay believes "the mainframe will be the most important business computing platform for at least
the first third of this century." His predicts that the implications of virtualization on this platform
will cause a spike in demand for this skill set and he wants his students to be ready.
To this end, Prof. Seay is developing a three-course System z certification
program that he hopes will soon become part of the NCCU curriculum. He maintains a close relationship with System z
customers that he has met at the SHARE conferences, and to date, 11 of his students have landed jobs at large financial
institutions. In January 2008, NCCU and Prof. Seay were featured in EnergiZed, a System z magazine profiling 28 schools
from around the world. |
