Graduates of the program—with skills in designing and developing software, understanding and applying software development processes and methodologies, and leveraging software development tools throughout the development life cycle—are well positioned for successful careers.

With software applications of enormous size, complexity, and expense now prevalent in diverse domains, software engineering has never been as important a field as it is now.

Students gain necessary talents to be successful in today’s organizations, following current industry practices: designing and developing software; understanding and applying software development processes and methodologies in their work; leveraging software development tools used in the various phases of the development life cycle; and functioning as an effective member of a software development team or organization.

Students develop their knowledge and skill though high-level electives where they write major projects in diverse areas such as client/server programming for the web, distributed programming for large clusters of processors, database programming, and markup language transformation. While working on modern applications with current software engineering practices such as Extreme Programming, students learn to analyze and apply good algorithms and other relevant tools.

The department of Labor estimates there will be a 39% (184,000) increase in demand for Computer Systems Analysts in the next ten years. And in the recent projections of job growth by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), new hires are on the upswing for software design and development graduates in particular, with an average starting salary of $57,729