This year marks the 31st anniversary of the creation of the Computer Engineering specialty. It has been thirty-one years full of changes and evolution, especially if we take into account facts such as the fact that the World Wide Web only appeared in 1991.
Engineer Jorge Solís, professor of the Computer Engineering Section and Advisor to the Rector's Office, reviews the birth and consolidation of this specialty and meditates on the challenges to be faced when moving in a field of permanent and accelerated change: computer sciences.
Mr. Solís explains that before the Computer Engineering specialty was created, computer operation was carried out by programmers and analysts who did not necessarily have professional training, most of whom had been trained on the job.
Times, however, were changing and computing became an increasingly imperative need, which encompassed new areas. The PUCP, aware of this, decided to create the specialty of Computer Engineering in 1990: "At that time, the law required to create a new career to have a teaching staff with master's or doctoral degrees. Since the Engineering Department did not have master's or doctoral degrees in the area of computer science, a group of mathematicians, led by our well-remembered Maynard Kong, was asked to take on this task", says Mr. Solís. The first graduating class, in 1995, had four graduates.
Two years after its creation, the need to rethink the specialty became evident, because the course was too mathematically oriented: "Students were studying algorithms and subroutines, complex issues that although they were useful for developing basic software, at that time they were not very useful in Peru", explains Mr. Solís. For this reason, a commission was appointed to refocus the career and reevaluate the curriculum, which was chaired by Engineer Luis Ríos.
This commission began by asking itself what type of professional it wanted to train: "What Peru needed at that time were professionals who, through computer science, could help solve business problems, considering that, for these purposes, companies are not only institutions that do business, but also the state, the church, the university, and, in general, any institution that has to make decisions to properly manage its resources," said Mr. Solís.
The committee also understood that the rapid technological progress made it necessary to modernize the computer equipment: "The development in computing is very variable, and in 1990 micro-computing was already being born", explains engineer Solís. With this in mind, a varied laboratory was created, in which equipment that was still in use coexisted with that which was innovative at the time. All of this eventually converged into today's PC laboratories.
Much has changed since then. Technology has evolved at an accelerated pace and the sciences are increasingly intertwined. For Mr. Solís, the main challenge currently facing the specialty is to redefine the focus that should be given to the career, because: "Technologies are changing faster and faster and there is always the risk of being out of step with the new demands of the market. I think it is time to rethink the orientation of the specialty. I think that the specialty should be placed at a managerial level, with a better overview of business management and the management of the IT function," he says.
Mr. Solís stresses the importance of seeking a balance between theory and practice in the training of students in the specialty: "Method and theory help you to do the things you already know in a more orderly and better way, but they do not solve the problem if you don't know how to identify it," he says.
In this sense, Mr. Solís considers that courses such as "Business Simulation Models" are very enriching: "This course offers students a review of the most important business concepts for the management of the company, with the justification that they constitute a tool that allows companies to project themselves into the future, considering the effects of decisions taken now", he concludes.
Year of writing: 2021