COLUMN: Hacking away at university programs
It is probably safe to say that in the college setting you learn a lot of skills. Among some of the many skills that can be learned through intensive coursework and studying are writing skills, research skills, presentation skills and cooperative working skills. While these skills are all important and noteworthy, there is one glaring omission in this list.
The best way to indicate what this missing skill is would be to paraphrase the great philosopher Napoleon Dynamite, who implied that girls only like guys who have great computer hacking skills.
For those of you so far off the radar that you think computer hacking is coughing out pieces of hard drives from your body, let me assure you that it is nothing of the sort. Computer hacking is the method used for breaking into protected computer programs, and to the shame of our beloved institution, Utah State University offers no such courses. Sure, we have computer science majors and electrical engineers in our university. And, to their credit, I am certain they have done their fair share of hacking. But when I suggest that we should encourage the study of computer hacking, I am not referring to supplemental instruction to already existing computer classes. I am referring to a full-fledged, in depth university department dedicated entirely to hacking.
I am not ignorant to the fact that starting an entirely new program is a very complicated procedure. For one, how do we find willing professors for this new program?
Most of you might think that such a feat would take a long process of weeding through applicants from respected university programs throughout the country. I beg to differ. Why waste time with worthless credentials and resumes, when Hollywood can tell us exactly what type of profiling will give us successful results?
According to the movies I’ve seen, to get the best computer hacker professors, we should search for overweight individuals, with scraggly beards, and long, unkempt hair, who seem to always use the keyboard (never the mouse) and mutter comic book hero quotes under their breaths. These quotes are often coupled with an occasional, “zooming in” and “enhancing,” along with other technical terms that only add to their repertoire of incomprehensible lingo, followed closely by some indistinguishable, rapid-fire taps on the keyboard.
Another complication of such a program would be how to assess someone’s computer hacking skills. How do you grade someone on how well they hack?
Actually, this happens to be one of the easiest problems to solve.
Grading will be done by simply having the professor mark everyone in the class down with an “F.” If the students are able to hack through the professor’s grading program and change their grades by the end of the semester, they obviously have demonstrated sufficient hacking skills. The bonus is that it doesn’t require any extra effort on the part of the professor.
Some of you may be wondering how in the name of floppy disk drives I came up with the idea of adding a computer hacking department to the university’s prestigious program. Well, my inspiration will be kept a carefully guarded secret, but in order to dispel any vicious and uncouth rumors before they get started, let me underscore emphatically that this whole column was not some selfish ploy by me to find someone who might possibly be able to hack into some supposed Microsoft Excel documents that might have been password protected since 1996 and the password has long since been forgotten. Again, this is not my intention. So if you do have such hacker skills, be sure to not get in touch with me to help me with such a pretended quandary (rewards of free copies of the movies Sneakers and the Net will not be given to the successful hacker).
Marty Reeder is a senior majoring in history education. To contact Marty you can hack into his email account at martr@cc.usu.edu.