Girls, beer and C++: How to choose the right Comp-Sci degree for you

Ten years...

this October since I started my CS degree course at Bristol. Now I am in my third job and am very happy with my career; a lot of that is thanks to the degree I did even though I might not have thought it at the time.

Looking back, uni days were awkward for all sorts of reasons (at that age, you think you're an adult, and in many ways you are, but in many other ways you're not). but I learned a lot and scraped a 1st class MEng degree. Sometimes life at uni was enjoyable, other times quite the opposite; I guess that is par for the course when you're that age.

The degree and grade itself gets less useful as time goes on, but the things you learned at uni remain as useful as ever. The modules I disliked because they were hard/I couldn't understand them turned out to be some of the most useful, and I guess at a lesser university they'd have skipped them altogether. At the time I thought "there is no way any of this stuff will turn out to be relevant"; I thought all software engineering in the real world revolved around Java, PHP and web apps - but it turns out most of it is driven by C and C++ and people who know how to debug something at both the very lowest level and the very highest are highly in demand and I'm very glad I dragged myself to all those low-level lectures about computer architecture and compiler design.

So yeah, doing a good degree is hard, but it will pay off. Don't shoot yourself in the foot through laziness.

or you could do a degree in meeja

I did an A-level in comp sci back in the early 1990s. We were using Xenix on a network of 386s and as there was no Pascal compiler installed on the system our tutor reluctantly taught us C. We did our editing in vi. We did a little bit of assembly coding. I remember covering CISC CPU architecture, networks and databases (I think we had an Oracle 5 site license) in a fair amount of detail. With this knowledge of UNIX, a real-world programming language and relational databases I went on to do a degree in journalism.

"This weird new software was Unix"

Hmm. 1984.

You were a bit behind me.

I was introduced to UNIX at Durham University between 1978 and 1981 (V6 and V7 on a PDP11/34e, - and yes, there was one girl on the course in my year), and got a job needing UNIX in 1982. I admit that it was at a college (Newcastle Poly.), but I am still using what I learned, 35 years later, as a techie (not jumped to management, teaching [dallied with this for a year], or horror of horrors recruitment! [dig intended, in a light-hearted way]). Very glad I chose what I did as a career, and I'm one of the few people in my sphere who actually like their work, even after such a long time.

Strangely, I dug my copy of Lions UNIX V6 commentary out yesterday to check the way that Ancient UNIX did something that IBM, in their wisdom, choose not to document for AIX. Not sure whether it is still relevant, but it was a real nostalgia trip.

Just hoping there will still be a need for deep UNIX skills for the next 13 years to get me to retirement age. I don't want or intend to retire until I have to!

Hmm

started compsci here but after a year kinda lost interest in it mostly because it's geared to teach you the basics that if you previously were taking anything like that in high school(local equiv) you already knew and were basically bored of it. So still without a degree in anything, 6 years employed as a sysadmin since then at a SMB/E company making decisions on purchases, planing, deployments and so on. Have the respect of the CEO(at the head office) and of my manager and my boss. The only thing I still need to teach them is that you pay a sysadmin to sit on his arse to stare at nothing most of the time because you really only need him/her when something breaks.

Re University Reputation

Interesting observation - thanks. This comment is well off-target re matters of importance to IT, but is (in my untested opinion) on target about the importance - the vital necessity indeed - of our 'Universities' (hah!) (and even more, of our high schools) to equip our young ones with the competitive skills to earn for UK.

In this regard, one of the 'Universities' I know of (Winchester School of Art, part of the University of Southampton) appears, to these (very old) eyes, to have a completely orthogonal objective. It appears to be in place only to extract money in obscene volumes from Chinese youth, returning to them poor quality instruction for a Master's (what a joke) degree, that could be covered, in about 3 intensive weeks, but at a higher quality, by an in-house course from a major UK plc. Any suggestion that the University should regard itself as a supplier (of skills) and hence be subject to the normal customer-dissatisfaction/product-replacement/money-back process, results in extreme reactionary responses from staff.

I doubt that WSA is alone. The whole morality and effectiveness/competitiveness and objectives of the tertiary education industry in UK (important to our balance of payments) needs urgent, invasive and decisive review (but, please, not another 'nobody is to blame' Staffordshire-style enquiry).

Posted anonymously for obvious reasons. The staff may have limited intellectual, industry and administrative skills, but I'm sure they can still heave a brick through my window!

Good article

Up to age 18, I had been putting money away to pay for Uni (not for CS but a bio-med course); I had even visited a couple of places to see which I Iiked. Then Shit Happened big time; and I was working 70 plus hours a week to feed, clothe and house a family of 6. (No regrets; in no universe would I have taken a different route)

Many years later, like many others, I found myself moving into IT because I had an interest and had played with PC hardware as a hobby. My management and project management experience over 20 plus years in a variety of sectors gave me a major boost. However, I was in the position to expand my academic knowledge and I chose to do a part-time Masters through the Open University.

There are those that will denigrate the OU and they often ignore it on the grounds that it is not a "real" university; but the OU does provide some really good courses with a lot of value. I'd also highlight that these are very regularly updated so you get quite a lot more of the more up to date thinking.

You have to be really committed to the studies though; when you've done a full week of 8-10 hour days, it can be hard to switch your mind over to studying. The drop out rate is high because many just can't manage their time or find that it is just too hard. But that just means that when you do get the award, it means that much more. If nothing else, it can provide you with newer ideas.

I'd recommend it to anyone; and you don't have to drive yourself arse deep in debt just to get a piece of paper that most recruiters wouldn't know (or appreciate) from something knocked out on a copy of Photoshop.

Not sure I agree with the article

But might just be the route I took.

Maths, physics, chemistry A levels first itme round - bit pants, so retook, but replaced chemistry with CS and got an A. This was in 84-85. Ended up at UEA on the CS course, and really enjoyed it. Also think mu A level CS stuiff was pretty interesting, coming from a BBC micro background.

Maths

Again, we see that all you need for Computing is Maths. And yet, almost without fail, the worst developers that I've come across have also been maths graduates.

I've had Maths specialists spray me with spittle for hours on end, telling me that the "next generation" of computer languages will write themselves, there's no point in learning development and that every application can and should be mathematically described. Even the simplest of optimisation / performance demonstrations between a mathematically described process and one that's been thought about failed to sway most of these spittle spreaders. It was almost a religion to many of them.

There are many things you need to be a good developer, a maths degree is far from the most important unless you're going to be specifically using maths in what you develop, in which case pray for the sanity of those that take over what you've developed if your maths is good but your coding skills are poor. Coding skills? Entirely separate from maths, are more about organisation and planning, logical awareness and experience and knowledge with a hearty dose of artistry thrown in than any degree course title.