Student’s Attraction for a Carrier Path Related to Databases and SQL:

Usability vs Efﬁciency in Students’ Perception - Case Study

Manuela-Andreea Petrescu

and Emilia-Loredana Pop

Department of Computer Science, Babes Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

Keywords:

Database, SQL, Perception, Student, Computer Science, Gender, Expectations, Carrier Path.

Abstract:

This study explores and analyses the expectations of second-year students enrolled in different lines of study

related to Database course, as their interest in having a carrier path in a database related domain and how

it reﬂects the job demands from the market. The participants in the study provided two sets of answers,

anonymously collected (in the begging and in the middle of the course), thus allowing us to track how their

interests changed as long as they found out more about the subject. We asked for their experience and initial

knowledge, we found out that they are aware of the SQL and databases’ usability and importance, but they

appreciated the database knowledge will be used occasionally. Even if it was not the original scope of the

paper, we also found out that men are more interested in learning in-depth (acquiring security, performance,

complexity database related information) than women do. In terms of the participants set, there were 87

answers from 191 enrolled students that were analyzed and interpreted using thematic analysis.

1 INTRODUCTION

Nowadays, databases mean power, usage, freedom,

and plenty of possibilities in the real life. Database

(DB) plays an important role in today’s society, in all

aspects of modern life, being utilized by companies,

public and private sectors of activity, research ﬁelds

of activity, personal life, and students’ career paths.

Databases play a major role in student management

at universities all over the world.

The database impact is huge not only in the aca-

demic world, but also in the medical world (databases

that store images for medical purposes as radiogra-

phers), in the car sector (the databases are also used

for image recognition), in the military sector (there

are databases with maps), and so on, even if the clas-

sical databases evolved (NoSQL databases for exam-

ple). Because of this demand and high database im-

pact, there is a need for specialized personnel, so SQL

and database know-how become a must for the stu-

dents in computer sciences. However, the domain

attractiveness (Computer Science and/or Mathemat-

ics) for secondary schools students depends on a set

of factors: the student’s socioeconomic status, moti-

vation, performance, self-efﬁcacy, task value beliefs,

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9537-1466

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4737-4080

engagement in Computer Science (Kahraman, 2022;

Spieler et al., 2020). Also, female students should be

empowered through direct encouragement, female-

only initiatives, and mentoring programs according to

the same authors.

We wanted to analyze the student’s perception and

their interest in following a database-related carrier,

and if the student’s interest decreases or increases

once they know more about this ﬁeld of work. Simi-

lar studies involving a variety of disciplines were per-

formed by (Kinash et al., 2017) in Australia, and a

deeper understanding and relevant progression paths

were given by (Gaebel et al., 2012) and (Allum et al.,

2014) (for PhD career pathways that can involve

databases).

We performed our analysis related to the Database

course involving students from different specializa-

tions and lines of study.

The scope of the paper is to ﬁnd out what are the

students’ expectancies about working with Databases

and SQL related domains and how these aspects cor-

relate with the demand in the labor market. We

wanted to ﬁnd out how interested are they at the be-

ginning of the course (ﬁrst survey), correlating the

interest level with DB/SQL knowledge (as some of

them have previous experience, others did not work

with an SQL statement) and if the interest changed

during the course (we performed a mid-term quiz -

182

Petrescu, M. and Pop, E.

Student’s Attraction for a Carrier Path Related to Databases and SQL: Usability vs Efﬁciency in Students’ Perception -Case Study.

DOI: 10.5220/0011838500003470

In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU 2023) - Volume 1, pages 182-189

ISBN: 978-989-758-641-5; ISSN: 2184-5026

 2023 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. Under CC license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

second survey). We also analyzed if they prefer a

career path that involves deeper usage of SQL (or

NoSQL statements), database security, or efﬁciency,

or they just consider these as being of seldom usage in

their career path or future job. To ﬁnd out, we asked

them open questions: R1: Do you have DB-related

knowledge?, R2: What are your expectations related

to DB course? What do you want to learn? and R3:

How do you plan to use the learned information? Are

you interested to work in DB-related ﬁelds?

Even if it was not the initial purpose of our paper,

we investigate how the students related themselves to

usability vs efﬁcacy in using databases in men com-

pared to women.

The paper is structured as follows: it starts with

an introduction and a Literature Review section where

we analyzed other papers that discussed the same

topic. In the Methodology section, we talked about

the methods used in this survey, starting with the par-

ticipant’s set, curricula, and asked questions. Sur-

vey questions and data analysis was performed in the

section Data Collection and Analysis, where we ana-

lyzed the received responses, performed a comparison

between men’s and women’s goals and we have ana-

lyzed the job taxonomies based on public ads versus

students’ interest to work in such a position. We have

analyzed the possible Threats to Validity and the ac-

tions performed to minimize and mitigate them. The

Conclusion and Future Work section ends and sum-

marises our work and the obtained results, and men-

tions future approaches and work.

2 LITERATURE REVIEW

The databases topic proved to be important and use-

ful in the last decade, as the storage capacity become

cheaper, the databases increased their size, storing

more and more information, and bringing different

perspectives and alternatives to people’s carriers.

In parallel with computer science (and database

related knowledge) development, women’s activity in

this area increased, due to the variety of possibili-

ties to which computer science and database knowl-

edge can be applied. Different job positions appeared

to satisfy the demand from the computer science do-

main, and as more jobs were generated, women found

it easier to work in a ﬁeld that was previously dom-

inated by men (Weston et al., 2019; Spieler et al.,

2020; Berkeley School of Information, 2021). The

variety of available positions jobs in database-related

ﬁeld development include Database Administrator,

Data Scientist/ Data Analyst, Data Operator, Database

Migration Operator, Data Migration Manager, Rela-

tional/ Non-relational/ SQL/ NoSQL Database De-

veloper ( Azure Lead Developer Backend), Business

Analyst/ Business Intelligence Developer, Database

Manager, Software Developer/ Database Engineer,

Database Architect, and many others (for example

(Jaiswal, 2022)).

In the idea of choosing the best career path for

students, the article (Verma et al., 2017) presents an

useful and comprehensive student-centric recommen-

dation system. The article is based on the research

analytics framework and uses the three-dimensional

model for measurements integrated with the relative

weighted set generated using the Analysis Hierar-

chical Process decision system. Other guidance in

choosing the career path is given by (Hasan et al.,

2020) and presents also psychological, sociological,

and developmental perspectives. It also reveals the

needs of the individual for a sustainable future, tak-

ing into consideration external factors, internal im-

provements, path-related dynamism, and practical as-

pects. Aspects related to the idea of choosing the

desired career path with a high degree of efﬁciency

and a comparison between genders are presented in

(Mann et al., 2020). Digital carrier aspiration seems

to be inﬂuenced by gender, according to (Wong and

Kemp, 2018), who performed 32 semi-structured in-

terviews with digitally skilled teenagers, aged from

13 to 19 years old, and analyzed and identiﬁed their

digital interests. Creativity was identiﬁed as being a

career pathway very important and especially the girls

proved to tend to become a consumer rather than a

creator in technology. (Mckenzie and Bennett, 2022)

investigated the career aspirations of undergraduate

IT students from an Australian university, by com-

pleting an online self-assessment of study and career

conﬁdence related to the discipline and also a sur-

vey about short-term and longer-term career aspira-

tions and prior experience. The intrinsic interest and

enjoyment of IT proved to be the best motivation to

study IT and also brought insights for career aspira-

tions, without realizing the time need it to such a job

position. Combining the presentation of an alumni

database architecture that could extract, transform and

load data from alumni LinkedIn proﬁles of the stu-

dents who graduated with Bachelor of Science de-

grees and Master of Science degrees with their ca-

reer trajectory, the conclusions showed, for them, the

choice of different career paths, like engineers and

managers on one side and managers and analysts on

the other side (Li et al., 2016). In the literature re-

view, there are studies with important elements and

arguments related to databases and also surveys per-

formed to obtain relevant information, from students,

professors, and different members (Dehghani et al.,

Student’s Attraction for a Carrier Path Related to Databases and SQL: Usability vs Efﬁciency in Students’ Perception -Case Study

183

2018; Uzun et al., 2020).

One of the most important aspects related to

databases is connected to the Structured Query Lan-

guage (SQL), which provides relevant information for

a potential user. In Computer Science and Software

Engineering, SQL skills are mandatory. Besides the

knowledge of the SQL language, pedagogical skills

are needed in education. (Taipalus and Sepp

anen,

2020) presents an overview of the educational SQL

research topics, research types, publication fora, and

also some SQL teaching practices. The idea for ed-

ucational SQL research should be to include replica-

tion studies, studies on advanced SQL concepts, and

studies on aspects that are not related to data retrieval.

This study includes also teaching practices in SQL

education and a systematic map of educational SQL

research and future research agenda.

Databases include big amounts of data stored in

complex and different manners with the help of vari-

ous methods and tools. Databases can include SQL,

NoSQL, Big Data, Business Intelligence, Data Sci-

ence, or Data Analytics. (Fotache and Strimbei, 2015)

presents some of the coordinates used in processing

data and implications for the academic curricula, and

also provides arguments for the positions of Data An-

alyst and Business Intelligence to acquire a corre-

sponding level of SQL and Data Warehouses knowl-

edge.

Nowadays, there are plenty of tools and online

trainings, documents (see, for example, (IBM, 2010),

(Halvorsen, 2017)), articles, and video’s that present

in a detailed manner, aspects related to databases,

such that each of us can learn the SQL / NoSQL tech-

nique.

3 METHODOLOGY

The survey research method was used for the study,

according to ACM Sigsoft Empirical Standards for

Software Engineering Research (Ralph, 2021). The

questionnaire included two one-choice questions and

two open questions. The idea was to obtain multiple

and relevant information.

In total, there have been given two questionnaires

to the students, one at the beginning of the semester

and another one in the middle of the semester. The

idea was to measure the differences that appeared in

students’ perceptions related to a carrier tightly con-

nected to the course topic, at the beginning, when the

subject was relatively unknown to them, and in the

middle of the semester, when the subject began to

be known. This aspect can reveal the involvement

of students in database course. We repeated some

Table 1: Databases curriculum.

Curriculum

Lecture 1. Introduction to Databases. Fundamental

Concepts.

Lecture 2. The Relational Model.

Lecture 3. SQL Queries.

Lecture 4. Functional Dependencies.

Lecture 5. Normal Forms.

Lecture 6. Relational Algebra.

Lecture 7. The Physical Structure of Databases.

Lecture 8. Indexes.

of the questions to check how the student’s inter-

ests changed after they acquired Database knowledge.

The students that took part in the study were enrolled

in the Database course in different lines of study, but

the learning topics (course syllabus) were identical.

The topics for the courses are the ones given in Table

The questions from the surveys have been anony-

mous and optional, a student could answer one ques-

tion, to all of them or none. Because of this aspect,

we have fewer participants in the study (students that

provided feedback) compared to the total number of

students: 87 vs 191 enrolled students. The closed

questions from the questionnaire relieved the special-

ization and the gender of the students and were used

to determine the participant groups while performing

the data analysis.

3.1 Participants

We asked a number of 191 enrolled students to partic-

ipate in the survey, from which a number of 87 partic-

ipated and provided answers.

We considered that the number of students that an-

swered is representative in terms of percentage 46%

and in terms of received number of responses. The

received number of responses is comparative with the

number of received responses from other published

studies in the computer science domain (Petrescu and

Sterca, 2022; Motogna et al., 2021). The students

asked to answer the survey were from the following

specialization and lines of study:

• Computer Science - Romanian line, 84 students

from which 61 men and 23 women,

• Computer Science - English line, 52 students from

which 41 men and 11 women,

• Mathematics and Computer Science - English

line, 55 students from which 36 men and 19

women.

191 students were enrolled in the course, 53 girls

and 138 boys, the percentage of the enrolled girls is

CSEDU 2023 - 15th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

184

relatively similar for all lines of study; the women

vs men percentage of enrolled students is 28%. We

wanted to make sure that the survey is representative

for all the segments of the population, so we asked for

gender and we got 42% of the answers stating there

are girls. Due to these aspects, we concluded that the

girls were well represented in the responses received

from the target population. Women seem to be more

likely to participate in the survey.

3.2 Data Collection and Analysis

The responses used in this study have been collected

anonymously, using Google forms, thus allowing us

to see in real-time the provided answers and the time

when they were submitted. Most of the responses

were submitted on the same day (45,54% of the to-

tal number). The same students were required to par-

ticipate in both surveys (after the ﬁrst course and in

the middle of the semester), and they were informed

about the purpose of the surveys and how the provided

information will be used. The surveys remained open

for 10 days allowing everyone who was interested to

participate to submit their point of view. We opted

for closed questions to be able to establish data sets

more precisely and for open questions for the topics

where we wanted to have more data and a profound

understanding. For collecting data we used quan-

titative methods: in fact, speciﬁc questionnaire sur-

veys as they were speciﬁed in the empirical commu-

nity standards (Ralph, 2021); questionnaire surveys

were used in other computer science related studies

(Tichy et al., 1995; Redmond et al., 2013; Petrescu

et al., 2022; Petrescu and Sterca, 2022). For text in-

terpretation we used thematic analysis (Braun et al.,

2019) (previously used in computer science studies in

(Kiger and Varpio, 2020; Motogna et al., 2021)), and

performed the following steps:

• Obtaining the answers.

• If needed, the answers were restructured and allo-

cated to other study questions, as parts of the an-

swers were sometimes better ﬁtted as an answer

to other questions.

• Determined the speciﬁc keywords.

• Selected keywords were grouped into classes by

one author.

• The other author veriﬁed the classiﬁcation, and

did some observations; the observations were an-

alyzed by both authors and small changes were

done.

Sometimes the students mentioned their SQL knowl-

edge as an answer to the course expectations, or there

were other cases when the answer for a question was

detailing aspects of another question. Due to these

facts, we had to remap some answers (or parts of the

answers). Some answers contained one keyword, and

others contained more than one; so we decided to an-

alyze the percentage of answers where a speciﬁc key-

word appears, as a consequence, we will work with

percentages.

For the ﬁrst quiz, we gathered 52 answers from

students and 37 answers for the second quiz. The

questions asked in both surveys - common question

are QC1,QC2, QC3 and QC4, in the ﬁrst quiz we also

had Q1 and Q2:

• QC1: Line of study (choice of Computer Science

/ Mathematics and Computer Science)

• QC2: Gender (Choice of Male / Female / I don’t

want to answer).

• QC3: How do you plan to use the learned infor-

mation?

• QC4: Are you interested to work in DB-related

ﬁelds?

• Q1: Do you have DB-related knowledge?

• Q2: What are your expectations related to the

Database course?

3.3 Q1: Do You Have DB-Related

Knowledge?

This course was an introductory lecture to databases

and SQL statements, so we expect to have enrolled

students that did not work previously with SQL or

with databases. We wanted to ﬁnd out what is their

knowledge level, and consequently, we had students

that did not have any SQL experience or knowledge:

”My database knowledge is practically nonexistent”,

”I have NoSQL or databases knowledge” and we

had students that mentioned ”I had an internship as

a software engineer where I worked with SQL”, ”I

currently use some of the principles at work”, ”I

used SQL queries working on a SpringBoot intern-

ship program”. However, none of the students rec-

ommended themselves to have good or very good

database knowledge. In terms of self-evaluation,

19.23% of them mentioned they don’t know SQL or

database related information and a similar percentage,

21.15% mentioned that have little knowledge. We

could conclude that the knowledge level of database

related topics was relatively low among the students

that enrolled in the course, aspects that can be corre-

lated with the fact that around 84% of them mentioned

that they want to learn databases basics.

Student’s Attraction for a Carrier Path Related to Databases and SQL: Usability vs Efﬁciency in Students’ Perception -Case Study

185

3.4 Q2: What Are Your Expectations

Related to the Database Course?

We found three keywords related to database basic

concepts - 84%, database administration - 31%, and

SQL learning - 58% as depicted in Figure 1. A large

part of the students just wanted to ﬁnd out and under-

stand how databases are working, to be able to use

them without knowing too much about complexity,

efﬁciency, or security.

Figure 1: Student’s Interests.

Most of the students were aware of the databases’

role and importance and expressed their interest in

learning the basics: ”Understanding the databases

and their role in applications”, ”To know how

databases are functioning”, ”To learn to create a

database having a good table structure, the SQL

statements are not important as I can ﬁnd them on

internet. We should know only that they exist, how

are called and used for, and then we could search

for them on the internet”. Even if we had a couple

of answers stating their expectations are pretty high,

as they want to be able to operate without problems

complex databases, we concluded that on average, the

student’s expectations for the course were to achieve

only basic knowledge and most of them were not in-

terested in topics such as performance, efﬁciency, se-

curity, and so on.

3.5 Q3: How Do You Plan to Use the

Learned Information? Are You

Interested to Work in DB-Related

Fields?

In the ﬁrst quiz, 42,30% of the students mentioned

that they plan to use SQL and DB knowledge only

occasionally, as they consider DB knowledge to be

useful in developing an application: ”I want to learn

DB theory and to apply it in an application”, ”I want

to learn new things that could help me in the future”

or ”I’ll need this information when I will develop my

applications/sites”.

In the middle of the semester, in the second quiz,

27% of the students considered that the course in-

formation is interesting, and useful in every domain

appeared in 17% of the answers. 11% of the an-

swers mentioned they are more attracted to the DB

domain. However, in total, the percentage of students

that would not choose to work in a DB-related ﬁeld

was 55,56%, compared to 25% in the ﬁrst quiz. The

percentage of students that did not decide decreased

from 26.9% in the ﬁrst quiz to 11.11% in the second

quiz, so as they learned more about databases, the per-

centage of students that don’t want to work in a DB-

related ﬁeld increased. The percentage of the students

that want to work in DB-related ﬁelds remained rel-

atively the same, as the students that were undecided

made up their minds by not preferring a DB-related

carrier path, the evolution can be visualized in Figure

Figure 2: DB-related Work Interest.

There is an interesting aspect related to the

Database course versus having a career related to

databases, as even if the students ﬁnd the course in-

teresting, they do not picture themselves having a ca-

reer in this domain: ”I found this course interesting,

but I keep my opinion: I don’t think I’ll work in the

Database domain, but I’m 100% sure that I’ll use

them”, ”I like the idea of databases, but I don’t see

myself working in this ﬁeld, not at least directly”, ”I

see it more clearly and the approach is not very com-

plex so I can acquire some conﬁdence in this subject.

I don’t exclude working in this ﬁeld of activity but I’m

not sure for now.” We concluded that the number of

students wanting to work in a DB-related ﬁeld was

constant compared to the beginning of the course, and

the number of students that did not want to work in

a DB-related ﬁeld grew as the number of undecided

students shrunk. Also, most of the students are aware

that databases knowledge is a must when working as a

programmer, but they plan to use it only occasionally.

CSEDU 2023 - 15th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

186

3.6 Usability Versus Efﬁciency and

Complexity, Expectations in Men vs

Women

Even if it was not a study question, when we analyzed

the responses to the questions, we noticed that the

men’s answers show different expectations compared

to women’s and we performed a comparison between

them. Most of the students did not set high goals:

84% mentioned that they want to know the basics,

and only 13,46% mentioned efﬁciency as an achiev-

able goal, to retrieve the information from databases

in an efﬁcient manner (fast)”. Complexity appeared

in 11,54% of the total number of answers in the re-

sponse related to course expectations question: ”I

want to learn to manage a database in a complex ap-

plication”, ”I expect that by the end of the course to

be able to administrate and manipulate a database re-

gardless of its complexity”. Security was not on the

list of priorities, only 3,85% mentioned it: ”how to

protect the data and to make a database more efﬁ-

cient”. Integration with other applications or devel-

opment environments appeared in 9.72% of the an-

swers: ”to know how a database works, what are the

relations between them and how to integrate it in dif-

ferent programming languages”, ”how to access them

from an external programming language(C#)”. As a

note, some answers mentioned one or more aspects

related to either security, complexity, or integration,

some students were more aware of these aspects than

others, but the overall percentage did not exceed 14%

of the total answers, it can be visualized in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Student’s Interest.

Related to gender, we wanted to ﬁnd out how the

students manifest their interests and we have seen

that men manifested a preoccupation for complex-

ity, security, performance, and integration more than

twice compared to women. The following ﬁgure

(Figure 4) presents the difference between men and

women (some students did not specify their gender,

and without considering them, the percentage of men

vs women preoccupation varies between 200% and

300%).

Figure 4: Student’s Interest by Gender.

In this context, other answers also raised our in-

terest, as they mentioned they expect to learn ”with-

out stress” or ”to know on an average level”. Based

on the data gathered and on their responses, we can

conclude that the students are not interested in learn-

ing databases information at a high and complex level,

preferring a more basic level. Also, men seem to be

more interested in learning more advanced features

related to security, complexity, or efﬁciency com-

pared to women.

3.7 Mentioned Jobs Versus Jobs

Taxonomy in Database-Related

Fields

The participants in the study were students in the sec-

ond year of Computer Science, due to this aspect,

we presumed that they would mention a larger va-

riety of jobs in their answers. However, it turned

out that they were relatively unaware of the jobs that

require SQL or DB administration skills, some of

them stating that they do not know what is SQL.

They just wanted to be able to use databases and

SQL instructions when needed, on an occasional base.

We turned to computer science literature (Bennett

et al., 2022) and technical reports (Gallagher et al.,

2022; Djumalieva1 and Sleeman, 2018) that evalu-

ated the jobs and the required skills based on the

job ads. In (Bennett et al., 2022), SQL skills ap-

peared tightly related to ”Programming language or

specialized software, Java, SQL, Python”, technical

reports (Gallagher et al., 2022) mentioned only one

job related to SQL and databases: ’SQL Database

Administrator’ that appeared in 0.49% of announce-

ments. (Djumalieva1 and Sleeman, 2018) performed

a more detailed analysis of the job taxonomy and re-

quired skills, SQL skills appear in 8.37% proportion

of unique job adverts, SQLite appeared in 0.17%, and

Student’s Attraction for a Carrier Path Related to Databases and SQL: Usability vs Efﬁciency in Students’ Perception -Case Study

187

it was related to application development. Related

to BI (Business Intelligence) and Data warehousing,

jobs like java developer, data architect, consultant,

analyst, and Oracle developer required database ad-

ministration skills; the ads were in 1.37% proportion.

There are also Data Engineer related jobs (NoSQL,

optimization, MongoDB, or PostgreSQL skills are re-

quired), but the percentage is relatively low: 0.72%

compared to software development ads proportion:

5.29%.

Based on these results, it seems that students man-

aged to focus on the most important part - SQL

knowledge in trend with the labor market demand.

4 THREATS TO VALIDITY

We paid attention to mitigate the validity risk, and

based on the guidelines deﬁned in (Ralph, 2021), we

decided to focus and analyze the following topics: tar-

get participant set, participants selection, contingency

actions for drop-outs, and we also took into consider-

ation research ethics.

The target participant set was represented by a

group of students enrolled in the database course

in different specializations (Computer Science and

Mathematics and Computer Science) and in different

lines of study (Romanian and English). The partic-

ipant selection was done using groups of study, and

the student’s grouping was done in alphabetical or-

der. After the groups were randomly selected, there

was no other participant selection, so all the students

belonging to the study groups were included in our

study. Thus there were no threats related to the par-

ticipant set or participant selection.

As participation in the study was optional, our

methods to enlarge the participation were limited; ex-

cept for explaining the survey purpose and asking stu-

dents to participate, there was not much we could do.

We could not enforce participation, even though it

was lower in the second survey compared to the ﬁrst

one (37 versus 52 responses).

As for research ethics, we informed the students

about the purpose of the questionnaire survey, and

about the fact it is optional (proved by response rates).

The survey questions were not mandatory, so a stu-

dent could answer only one or could answer all the

questions.

We had to address the possibility that our ap-

proach to data processing was a subjective one. We

tried to mitigate the risk by following the recommen-

dation for data processing and, as authors, by check-

ing each other’s work.

5 CONCLUSION AND FUTURE

WORK

We planned to analyze how second-year students en-

rolled in Computer Science and Mathematics and

Computer Science, perceived the SQL and databases

importance and how attracted are they to work in a

related domain. Even if a number of 191 students

participated in the course, only a part of them ef-

fectively participated in the survey by providing an-

swers. We asked for their expectation and interest to

work in a database-related ﬁeld at the beginning of

the course and we checked their interest in the mid-

dle of the course. We tried to eliminate all the pos-

sible threats to validity by having a diverse set of

participants (in terms of line of study and gender -

all students enrolled in the course could participate

if they wanted), an anonymous survey, and analyz-

ing the text responses as recommended by commu-

nity standards. We found out that they wanted to

learn SQL at a medium level. By the middle of the

semester, students that were undecided at the begin-

ning of the course, mentioned that they did not want

a job related to databases (DB administrator, SQL de-

veloper, and so on). Their options for following a car-

rier path in database-related domains match the job

offerings from the market. Even if was not the pur-

pose of the paper, we found out that men are more

interested in accumulating knowledge and having a

more profound understanding of the concepts in as-

pects related to security, complexity, and efﬁciency

compared to women. In the future, we plan to ﬁnd out

if the same trend in gender differences persists at the

end of the course and to verify these aspects in other

courses, and to extrapolate this study to the university

degree as a whole.

FUNDING

The publication of this article was supported by the

2022 Development Fund of the Babes¸-Bolyai Univer-

sity.

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