The Washington Post just published an article from a kid claiming he graduated at the top of his class at Penn State in Computer Science but couldn’t find a job. But his description of Computer Science classes is completely disconnected from reality. Turns out, he graduated with a degree in Management Information Systems (a business degree) and not from the Penn State any reasonable person would assume, but rather a satellite campus. All this info is right on the dude’s own LinkedIn page and a previous version of the article from Sept. 2013. Washington Post, Take Down This Article!

[This was initially publicly posted on Facebook here:

https://www.facebook.com/EmeryBerger/posts/10102236661609092]

Update – I wrote a Letter to the Editor of the Washington Post. They did not choose to print it, though they did partially correct the article.

Dear Editor:

A recent op-ed article by Casey Ark (“I studied computer science, not English. I still can’t find a job.”, August 31) is deceptive and misleading. Ark says he graduated at the top of his class at Penn State in Computer Science but found himself unable to find a job. All of these claims are false. An accurate headline would read “I studied business, not English. I had job opportunities, but I turned them down.”

Ark’s descriptions of his class experiences — non-rigorous, memorization-based, and non-technical — sound nothing like a Computer Science degree, and here’s why. A visit to his LinkedIn page (https://www.linkedin.com/pub/casey-ark/23/194/668) shows that he graduated with a degree in Management Information Systems, a non-technical business degree that has little to do with Computer Science and is decidedly not a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) field.

Ark also fails to mention that he attended a satellite campus rather than the more prestigious flagship University Park campus of Penn State, a fact included in an earlier version of this article that appeared on PennLive in September 2013

(http://www.pennlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2013/09/heres_why_why_more_and_more_college_grads_are_tossing_aside_their_resumes_and_embracing_entrepreneur.html). Regardless of its quality, leaving out the location leads readers to believe he graduated from the main campus.

In this earlier article, Ark describes having chosen to not take two entry-level job options, but instead deciding to become an entrepreneur.

I am surprised and chagrined that this op-ed made it through whatever fact-checking mechanisms exist at Washington Post, when a few moments with Google sufficed to discredit the central claims of the article.

Professor Emery Berger

School of Computer Science

University of Massachusetts Amherst

ADDITIONAL SIGNATURES

Professor Stephen A. Edwards

Department of Computer Science

Columbia University in the City of New York

Asst. Professor Brandon Lucia

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Carnegie Mellon University

Associate Professor Daniel A. Jiménez

Department of Computer Science & Engineering

Texas A&M University

Assistant Professor David Van Horn

Department of Computer Science

University of Maryland, College Park

Assistant Professor Santosh Nagarakatte

Department of Computer Science

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick

Assistant Professor Swarat Chaudhuri

Department of Computer Science

Rice University

Associate Professor Dan Grossman

Department of Computer Science & Engineering

University of Washington

Professor Michael Hicks (B.S. Computer Science, Penn State ‘93)

Department of Computer Science

University of Maryland

Associate Professor Matthew Hertz

Department of Computer Science

Canisius College

Associate Professor Landon Cox

Department of Computer Science

Duke University

Associate Professor Benjamin Liblit (B.S. Computer Science, Penn State ‘93)

Department of Computer Sciences

University of Wisconsin–Madison

Associate Professor John Regehr

School of Computing

University of Utah

Professor Jeff Foster

Department of Computer Science

University of Maryland, College Park

Kaushik Veeraraghavan

Facebook

Some comments from the Facebook thread posted by my fellow Computer Science colleagues:

PSU offers CMPSC 475, WHICH TEACHES iOS PROGRAMMING.

http://bulletins.psu.edu/und…/courses/C/CMPSC/475/201314SP