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On a rainy Saturday, Cameron Dolansky put on a metal-studded leather vest and a red tunic and headed the most raging weekend party at Neumont University in South Jordan, Utah.

It wasn’t your usual college kegger. A dozen students sat in a classroom frantically trying to kill the zombies racing across their computer screens. A few more jammed to “Rock Band,” their musician avatars displayed on two projector screens. Cans of Mountain Dew and fast-food wrappers littered the darkened room.

“Back in high school, I was the lone geek,” said Dolansky, who earned a rep on campus after he and his roommate played “Rock Band” for 72 hours straight. “Now I’m surrounded by geeks.”

Spread over two floors in a suburban office park south of Salt Lake City, Neumont University is devoted to pumping out a steady stream of experts in computer science — the only major that students can choose.

The six-year-old school places its graduates in high-tech jobs at such companies as eBay, Microsoft and IBM. If trends hold up, more than 90 percent of the 59 students graduating with bachelor’s degrees on Friday will find work within three months.

But surrounding introverted computer programmers with other introverted computer programmers creates unique challenges for school administrators. Employers praise the skills of Neumont’s graduates but complain about their computer addictions and difficulty socializing with colleagues. For their part, some students grumble that their peers spend too much time playing video games and too little time in the shower. So in addition to the intricacies of computer science, Neumont is trying to teach its students how to get along better in the real world. Administrators forced them to close their laptops in class, established social clubs and required them to take courses in interpersonal communications and public speaking.

The efforts have met resistance. After all, students ask, what’s the purpose of attending a place known affectionately as “Geek Heaven” if you’re not free to geek out whenever you choose?

One impediment to organizing student parties at Neumont is the lack of dormitories; students live off-campus. Another is a major shortage of women, whose ranks the school is trying to increase.

Cameron Murray, 20, from Cleveland, Ohio, estimates that the gender ratio is one woman in a billion (it’s actually 1 in 20). What’s more, he complains, the women at Neumont “are more like dudes with long hair,” which hurts the dating scene.

Eager to flirt, he and eight other members of a student group known as the Gentlemen’s Order moseyed down to a mall recently and split into teams to see who could get the most phone numbers from women. They wandered from food court to department store and back again, spending an afternoon in search of potential dates. The sum total of their efforts: a single number.

“We got shot down as hell — it was horrible,” Murray said.

The Gentlemen’s Order is one of five social clubs launched in September. Administrators refer to the orders as fraternities without the alcohol.

“We know that forming relationships outside of the classroom is an important part of the college experience,” said Edward Levine, Neumont’s president.

The orders still tend toward the geeky. There’s Game Shark Order, for students who like video games, and Beyond the Screen for those who enjoy tabletop games such as “Dungeons & Dragons.”

The Gentlemen’s Order is an outlier. Murray says he created it to show students how to attract women and have a good time.

“I don’t think anybody has enough fun at Neumont — it’s a bunch of people addicted to sitting in their mom’s basement playing ‘World of Warcraft’ and drinking Dr Peppers,” Murray said.

Instead of Mardi Gras, students hold Nerdi Gras, a video game party.

And though the student commons doesn’t have couches or fast food (or for that matter, any hot food at all), it does have a “Star Trek” pinball machine, a ping-pong table and a flat-screen TV frequently hooked up to Nintendo’s “Super Smash Bros. Brawl.”

Some of Neumont’s female students, who make up about 5 percent of the 266 enrolled this year, are on a mission to get their peers to tune into the world around them. In October, one posted a message on Neumont’s Web forums protesting what she called “offensive odors.”

“The truth is there are people in this school who just don’t smell pleasant at all,” she wrote.

The post generated more than a dozen replies, with students suggesting the creation of a personal-hygiene company, a crackdown on halitosis and a three-shower-a-day regimen.

“People [who probably just get busy and distracted by their passion for coding] need to remember to take care of themselves as well as they care for their machines,” Stacy Hughes, the school’s communication manager, wrote on the forum.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that Neumont students spend so much time in front of their computers. The school’s mission is to teach students how to be valuable computer programmers in just two and a half years.

The for-profit university was established in 2003 under the name Northface University and changed in 2005 to Neumont, or New Mountain, likewise an allusion to climbing a difficult peak.

For $28,800 tuition, students attend eight hours a day, five days a week, year-round with a few weeks off. The school attracts people who don’t mind the grueling schedule, the accelerated format or the fact that everyone lives off-campus.

“It ended up being kind of a Hogwarts environment where everyone ends up saying, ‘Everyone here is like me,’ ” said Graham Doxey, one of Neumont’s three founders and its president until late 2007, referring to Harry Potter’s school.

When the students graduate, though, they will need to know how to socialize with people who aren’t like them, which is why students are required to take three classes about communicating with others.

During a lecture for Collaborative and Interpersonal Communications I, students leaned back in their chairs while instructor Paul Parkin moved around the room to hold their waning interest.

“My goal is to heighten your awareness so you have the skills necessary to not carry germs into your relationships,” Parkin said.

Two guys wearing aviator sunglasses mumbled to each other, ignoring the lecture, while a few students took notes.

“You have to look up from your computer screens from time to time,” Parkin told them. “This will also help you if you’re in a relationship.”

“We don’t have many of those,” a student retorted. The classroom erupted into raucous laughter.

This kind of mocking and even flat-out resistance is a common response to Neumont’s efforts to entice students out of their computer-aided comfort zones. That includes the Laptops Up policy, introduced in April, which mandates that students close their computers in class at their instructors’ request.

Hughes said the school adopted the policy after employers reported that though Neumont grads were good at programming, they were too distracted by their computers during meetings.

Neumont students reacted to Laptops Up in the same way students on other campuses might react to a crackdown on alcohol: with rage.

“War is Peace/Freedom is Slavery/Ignorance is Strength/Laptops Up is Laptops Down,” reads a sticker distributed on campus by Joshua Boston, 18, a Florida native who was wearing computer wires as bracelets and welding goggles.

But even Boston conceded that something needed to be done to stir students out of their torpor. He once tried to organize a movie outing, he said, but his friends bailed because they preferred to stage a raid in the computer game “World of Warcraft.”

Hanging out in the typical college sense — beer bashes, football games — doesn’t appeal to many at Neumont. There’s another reason Neumont students don’t socialize much: They work really hard, taking a hefty helping of such courses as Algorithms and Data Structures I, Software Engineering Methodologies and Applications of Human Computer Interface Design.

“I might be missing a whole laid-back year of college,” said Christina Dessi, 19, from Eastham, Massachusetts. “But my friends at other colleges might not be able to get a job.”

 

Los Angeles Times