(Hallowed Halls...?)

The School

This here's the place I call my higher education. It's a good school, not too big, but not too small. A lot of people I know take classes here including Shannon, Jessie, and Tara. In fact, most of the student body are female (a single guy's dream!). Nipissing's only been a university for 10 years, but it tends to rank pretty good in surveys and such on post graduation employment (so that gives me a lot of hope!). Also, it's located on the nice piece of land with a pond, numerous walking trails, and plenty of open space in general.

The Program - Bachelor of Business Information Systems

A good program with it's share fo faults. That pretty much sums up the program itself. What is BBIS you ask? Simply put, it combines business courses and computer courses to give students a good background in both so that grads can find employment in the Information Technology field.

The courses themselves are good, so are the professors. There's nothing I can really complain about in this area, so some of these faults I find may seem small, but I think they shouldn't happen at all.

1. Miscommunication Abounds

For the sake of not having two similar courses taught in both Canadore College and Nipissing (the two share the same building...pretty much), all the computer courses are taught over at Canadore (which in itself is not a bad thing). The problem arises in the fact that Nipissing doesn't seem to bother communicating with Canadore about much. Most of the time I won't know what room or teacher I'll have until the day I sit in class. Also, the laptops that we have to use are configured with programs that Nipissing choses to put on. This may not be necessarily what Canadore requires for the courses. For example, the laptops we got were pre-loaded with Office XP when both my Access and VBA courses require 2K (if we don't switch and keep the XP on and it doesn't function right, we suffer with reduced marks - if in a test or exam). This shouldn't happen in the first place!

2. Accessibility of the Program Head

A requirement of the BBIS program is to have a work requirement fulfilled in the IT area. This isn't a problem except that the head of the program must approve the work that the student does. This professor also is very inaccessible: she teaches classes so she's not necessarily in her office, e-mails typically go unanswered etc. We have to rely on this professor for a lot and if we can't access her, we're screwed. Again, we suffer the consequences for someone else's problem.

3. Obselecense

I just realized this not that long ago, but the stuff we take is not even going to be in use by the time we graduate. For example, I've taken courses in Visual Basic, Microsoft Office 2000, and Windows 2000. Well, since then, these programs have been replaced with newer (and different) versions. By the time we complete our four years, we could be so far behind, that we could be lost. Not really a problem that the university could ever solve, but a potential issue nonetheless.

It may sound like I have a lot of problems with Nipissing University, but in reality it is a really nice place to go. It has a professional education without all the mass amounts of students that are in the institutions down south. Definitely worth checking out!