SOUTH JORDAN, UTAH — On a rainy Saturday, Cameron Dolansky put on a metal-studded leather vest and a red tunic and headed to Neumont University's most raging weekend party.
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 6-year-old school places its graduates in high-tech jobs at such companies as EBay Inc., Microsoft Corp. and IBM Corp. If trends hold up, more than 90% of the 59 students graduating with bachelor's degrees today 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?
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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, a leather jacket-wearing 20-year-old from Cleveland, 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.
