MIM at UMCP vs MSIS, MSMIS, MSIM at others

In this post I will compare and contrast the MIM program at University of Maryland College Park (UMCP), MSIS program at Kelly School of Business Indiana University, MS in MIS at Taxes A&M University (TAMU), MS IS program at University of Cincinnati and MS in IM at Syracuse University

MIM program at UMCP comes under College of Information Studies and it’s different from Masters in Library Science. MIM tries to cover the concepts of Business Administration, Computer Science and Information systems. Basically it deals with managing information in an organization at all the three levels of corporate environment viz. strategic level, management level and operational level by using various tools and techniques. Managing information here means analyzing it, sorting it, storing it and distributing it. Here is the differentiating factor for MIM from the MIS, MS IS and other programs. The programs like MS in MIS at TAMU have courses like Data Warehousing, Business Data Mining, Customer Relationship Mgmt and Planning, E-Commerce Technologies, Enterprise Resource Planning etc which deals only with the Information System concept and less importance is given to Business Administration (BA) and Computer science (CS) concepts. Similarly the MS IS program at University of Cincinnati also targets the Information System concepts but it also have a wide range of courses to select as Specialization Courses which deals with Business Administration concepts. But the program does not cover the strategic level courses of corporate environment. The MS IS program at Kelly school of Business covers the Information Systems, Business Administration as well as the Computer Science concepts to some extends. It also covers the strategic level courses as their electives. After reviewing the courses of MS in IM program at Syracuse University, I was able to relate it with some of the courses offered by MIM at UMCP as both of the programs are on Information Management. So you can say that both programs tries to target the IS, BA and CS concepts.

So it’s up to the individual to select the course of their liking. If you want to do something more specific, then you should go for MS MIS, MS IS programs. If you want to deal with more general topics then MIM would be a good choice. MIM degree at UMCP also covers the concepts of MIS but not in much detail. It will give you a basic idea about the concepts which are related to Business Intelligence, ERP, CRM etc. Also MIM degree at UMCP has great flexibility, so if you want to go for more technical side, you can take courses from computer science department and if you want to go for more management side, you can take courses from the business school.

The above details are from my personal experience and from my research on the programs mentioned above from the respective universities. These are my personal views, so it might differ from some other students pursuing the above mentioned courses.

Here are the links to the courses offered in the above mentioned universities:

MIM at UMCP: http://www.clis.umd.edu/courses/course_descriptionsINFM.shtml

MSIS at Kelly: http://www.kelley.iu.edu/isgp/docs/MSIS_enter_S07_or_F07.pdf

MSMIS at TAMU: http://mays.tamu.edu/depts/info/MS/Info_MSMIS.html

MSIM at Syracuse: http://ischool.syr.edu/academics/graduate/msirm/irm_req.aspx

MSIS at University of Cincinnati: http://www.business.uc.edu/msis/academics

Hope this helps the prospective students to make the decision on which program to select from such a wide range of programs offered by some of the best universities in USA!