Campus Connection

Computer science major explains why a college degree is worth it

UWL Junior Nate Karlen always knew he wanted to go to college, but he had a hard time seeing the value. He landed a part-time software engineering job in high school and had already helped the company automate processes. He had the natural smarts he needed to be successful. What college would afford him was basically a piece of paper to appease future employers, he thought. But after launching into UWL’s Computer Science Department classes, Karlen began to see the purpose of higher education. Those processes he was coming up with for the company using his intellect and self-taught coding worked and made sense to him, but they weren’t widely applicable. They wouldn’t necessarily make sense to the company’s future developers and couldn’t be changed easily with technological advancements. “You can’t just learn how to make one thing work,” he says.” You need to understand why it works so that when something new is added, you can figure out how to incorporate it. You need to be able to see the big picture and apply knowledge.” Karlen aims to earn a degree in computer science in May 2017. In his studies, he is now learning those big picture ideas and writing more thoughtful, quality software code. He regularly bounces ideas off UWL faculty and is able to see how experts in the field would approach a particular problem and why. “Learning the more advanced stuff is really exciting,” Karlen says. “As soon as I learn it, I see where it could be used to improve something I wrote.” Karlen continues to work part time and remotely for the company as a software developer, writing code to make processes run more efficiently. His job has gotten easier as he’s taken more advanced computer science classes. “When my boss asks me a question, I have an infinitely larger understanding of what needs to be done,” he says. “Without a degree, I think you would always be fighting so much harder than someone else who understands the big picture.” After graduation, Karlen plans to continue working for the company, CTech Manufacturing in Weston, Wisconsin, which is paying his tuition. Besides the know-how to do his job the right way, Karlen says a degree gives him the tools to be on the “right side” of the automated processes he is creating through software development. “A lot of jobs are disappearing because they are becoming automated,” he says. “That’s not going to go away.” So that piece of paper — his diploma — is pretty important to have. He’s able to offer evidence of his education and rely on a solid foundation to grow in his computer science career.