Michelle L. Johnson – How a Hood IT Degree Can Help Your Career

Michelle Lynne Johnson graduated cum laude from Hood College with a Bachelor of Arts in Law and Society in 2009 and returned to Hood in 2017 to begin the Master of Science in Information Technology. Hood was an easy choice due to its good reputation, perfect size and a well-balanced program with helpful professors.

“The atmosphere is welcoming, and the staff and students are friendly. I also enjoy meeting people from different countries,” adds Johnson.

She believes earning a master’s degree in IT has been helpful in her career. “I have gained an understanding of the seven domains of IT and how they affect the overall system.” She has also gained an overall knowledge of many different areas of IT, including networking, database management, system engineering and data mining. Knowledge in each of these areas has been beneficial to her current position as systems software analyst. Johnson's job requires her to troubleshoot users’ issues with the system. Those issues usually involve different domains and not just the software application. Therefore, she has been able to take the information she is learning in classes and apply them in her current job.

For the final project in her summer 2017 Web Development class, she had to create a five-page website showing the skills learned in the class. She was able to incorporate that information to create a page that simulated a checkout page and hide the information on the page until the user selected items to purchase and clicked checkout. The class also had a contest in order to see which group could produce the best website. “The females won due in part to our website having these extra features and being operational for the demo.”

She believes she is learning the most current information because some of the things she learns are even being implemented by her employer on a regular basis. “So, when I get an email about a new policy or procedure I know exactly what they are talking about and why they are doing it”, she says.

Johnson’s advice to someone considering applying for the IT degree program at Hood? Take as many of the different types of IT classes as possible because they are interrelated, and help to build the overall picture. For example, learning about how the databases are designed has been very helpful when users get errors. “I have been able to take my knowledge of databases and figure out much faster what the user may have done wrong or if there is a bug in the application.”