Article

Internships and occupational commitment of college students in IT-related majors

Authors:

Jeffrey Stanton,

Isabelle FagnotAuthors Info & Claims

SIGMIS CPR '06: Proceedings of the 2006 ACM SIGMIS CPR conference on computer personnel research: Forty four years of computer personnel research: achievements, challenges & the future

Pages 295 - 303

https://doi.org/10.1145/1125170.1125237

Published: 13 April 2006 Publication History

Abstract

We conducted two linked studies of students in IT-related majors who were recently or currently involved in some type of pre-professional work activity such as an internship. In the first study, we interviewed students to obtain their impressions of the occupational subculture of IT. Verbatims from interviews with the students, along with tallies of the categories of their responses, suggested that pre-professional experiences had given these students a realistic preview of IT occupational subculture. In the second study, we transformed the impressions we had received from the student interviews into a set of evaluative dimensions relevant to the characteristics of IT occupational subculture. We devised survey items to assess these evaluative dimensions, and then administered the survey to N=211 students to see if any differences existed among students grouped by gender or ethnicity. Finally, we used our measures of these evaluative dimensions to predict an outcome variable relevant to persistence in IT, namely occupational commitment. Some differences did arise among different groups of students, and some of the evaluative dimensions were useful in predicting occupational commitment.

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Cited By

Gibbons TSmith King LMusicant DCamp TTymann P(2012)Course guidesProceedings of the 43rd ACM technical symposium on Computer Science Education10.1145/2157136.2157172(105-110)Online publication date: 29-Feb-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2157136.2157172
Kaarst-Brown MGuzman IGallivan MDowney JJoseph D(2010)A cultural perspective on individual choices of STEM education and subsequent occupationsProceedings of the 2010 Special Interest Group on Management Information System's 48th annual conference on Computer personnel research on Computer personnel research10.1145/1796900.1796926(55-65)Online publication date: 20-May-2010
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1796900.1796926
Guzman IJoseph DPapamichail KStanton JNiederman FSumner MLending DVician C(2007)RIP - beliefs about IT cultureProceedings of the 2007 ACM SIGMIS CPR conference on Computer personnel research: The global information technology workforce10.1145/1235000.1235050(217-220)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2007
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1235000.1235050

Index Terms

Internships and occupational commitment of college students in IT-related majors
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Computing profession
      1. Testing, certification and licensing

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cover image ACM Conferences

SIGMIS CPR '06: Proceedings of the 2006 ACM SIGMIS CPR conference on computer personnel research: Forty four years of computer personnel research: achievements, challenges & the future

April 2006

368 pages

ISBN:1595933492

DOI:10.1145/1125170

General Chair:
Conrad Shayo
California State University, San Bernardino, USA
,
Program Chairs:
Kate Kaiser
Marquette University, USA
,
Terry Ryan
Claremont Graduate University, USA

Copyright © 2006 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 13 April 2006

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SIGMIS-CPR06: Forty Four Years of Computer Personnel Research: Achievements, Challenges and the Future

April 13 - 15, 2006

California, Claremont, USA

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Cited By

Gibbons TSmith King LMusicant DCamp TTymann P(2012)Course guidesProceedings of the 43rd ACM technical symposium on Computer Science Education10.1145/2157136.2157172(105-110)Online publication date: 29-Feb-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2157136.2157172
Kaarst-Brown MGuzman IGallivan MDowney JJoseph D(2010)A cultural perspective on individual choices of STEM education and subsequent occupationsProceedings of the 2010 Special Interest Group on Management Information System's 48th annual conference on Computer personnel research on Computer personnel research10.1145/1796900.1796926(55-65)Online publication date: 20-May-2010
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1796900.1796926
Guzman IJoseph DPapamichail KStanton JNiederman FSumner MLending DVician C(2007)RIP - beliefs about IT cultureProceedings of the 2007 ACM SIGMIS CPR conference on Computer personnel research: The global information technology workforce10.1145/1235000.1235050(217-220)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2007
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1235000.1235050

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