Was Your UL course any Good??

slickmcvic

What course did you do?

Was it relevant and is it related to what your doing now?

What were the positive and negative aspects to your course?

What would you like to see changed with it if ya were to start again?

.....I'm just a disillusioned graduate btw no a member of SS!!

Otacon

slickmcvic wrote: »

What course did you do?

I did Computer Systems with a number of other frequenters of this forum.

slickmcvic wrote: »

Was it relevant and is it related to what your doing now?

Yeah, it was relevant. It pretty much gave a broad overview of everything and allowed you to refine what you knew (or didn't) later in the course. Currently working in IT so yeah it was relevant to my work.

slickmcvic wrote: »

What were the positive and negative aspects to your course?

Positives: Nice lecturers, sound class mates (mostly), relatively few hours in the week (15 - 20)

slickmcvic wrote: »

What would you like to see changed with it if ya were to start again?

Well, seeing as initially I wanted to go into video game design, I might have chosen the new course if it was available at the time. But if I had to go back, no, I'd do the same course.

slickmcvic wrote: »

.....I'm just a disillusioned graduate btw no a member of SS!!

¬_¬

kaimera

relatively few hours in the week (15 - 20)

Which you still didn't manage to attend :rolleyes:

Did Comp Sys also; working in telecoms now. Final two years were enough to get me a job in the industry

Would I change it? Well the CS course we did changed two years after we started so theres your answer.

rmacm

Another Comp Sys person here and I'd agree with the above. Now to do what's expected of me these days, Otacon you gimp when are you coming to Dublin to go drinking?

Otacon

March 7th - 9th?

cson

Duuurty graduates...

chubba1984

I did Law & Accounting, graduated in '06.

Working as a tax consultant now so both aspects of the course were very relevant.

Positive - small number of hours, very little course work, classmates, co-op.
Negative - a number of poor lecturers, lot of work to do for exams.

Changes - include more tax elements and get rid of ridiculous subjects like statistics where the same exam comes up every year

rmacm

Otacon wrote: »

March 7th - 9th?

Grand job I should be able to make it out for a few pints with you then.

cson....have a cup of stfu

kaimera

Take it to PM for gawds sake Rory :rolleyes:

IrishMike

Did comp sys too.
Didnt like the course and i never worked in IT afterwards.
Its an ok course but some aspects of it were shocking such as the lack of networking and real world experience.
An entire module on Unix system calls which nobody uses is a case in point.

rmacm

IrishMike wrote: »

Did comp sys too.
Didnt like the course and i never worked in IT afterwards.
Its an ok course but some aspects of it were shocking such as the lack of networking and real world experience.
An entire module on Unix system calls which nobody uses is a case in point.

Ah when did you do Comp Sys?

How about co-op for real world experience. I had networking modules in 3rd and 4th year. What was the module on Unix system calls? I can assure that lots of people use Unix system calls.

cooperguy

slickmcvic wrote: »

What course did you do?

Was it relevant and is it related to what your doing now?

What were the positive and negative aspects to your course?

What would you like to see changed with it if ya were to start again?

.....I'm just a disillusioned graduate btw no a member of SS!!

Sounds like your not too happy with your course. What did you do?

bluedolphin

So, technically not a graduate but in my final semester so

slickmcvic wrote: »

What course did you do?

History, Politics, Sociology and Social Studies (taking History as my major and Public Admin and Economics as my two minors)

slickmcvic wrote: »

Was it relevant and is it related to what your doing now?

I'm hoping to get into journalism.
Directly relevant - no.

Indirectly relevant - very much so (critical thinking, independent working, analysis, writing skills, deadlines and balancing them). But if I put my hand on my heart I'll honestly say most of my education at UL came from outside the classroom.

slickmcvic wrote: »

What were the positive and negative aspects to your course?

Positives: I found the modules relatively interesting; co-op and Erasmus; plenty of scope to direct your degree in what subject choices/module choices you make.

Negatives: Co-op placements were generally not in areas that people wanted to go into after graduation. Same as myself: very useful and interesting, but irrelevant to my career path.

slickmcvic wrote: »

What would you like to see changed with it if ya were to start again?

- Better co-op places.
- More continuous assessment rather than final exams, because I believe that humanities' subjects shouldn't be about testing your abilities to regurgitate in an exam situation. An essay is much more beneficial to overall learning: you need to do a lot more research and apply a lot more critical thinking than would ever be needed in an exam. Degrees are about learning outcomes and I don't think that exams are the best way of facilitating these in the area of humanities.

slickmcvic

cooperguy wrote: »

Sounds like your not too happy with your course. What did you do?

What course did you do?

Done Materials Technology Education (Metal)


Was it relevant and is it related to what your doing now?
Some was,a lot wasnt.
The Education lectures took up and wasted an awful lot of time..most of the stuff hasn't been used in 4 yrs working!!
The Fabrication part of the course was alright but there was so much essential stuff we were never shown...I have done 2 FÁS courses so far and find them much more beneficial .
The course was very much geared towards teaching the top end students..the stuff like material technology was great,the polymer labs,material testing...all interesting
There was no mention of Leaving Cert Applied...Stuff like welding,scroll work,decorative metalwork,Engine mechanics were all ignored.

What were the positive and negative aspects to your course?
Positive
Great bunch of lads in the course!
The 3d Modelling & CAD projects have proved very usefull.
The Materials part of the course.
Teaching practice was tough but relevent



Negative
Some Completely irrelevant modules. Thermodynamics in final Year???
Structural Mechanics....For wha??
lack of any heat metalwork.
A Placement in a production/fabrication enviroment would have been useful.
..Nothing to do with maintainence ...Setting up machines,health and safety audits.
I dont think the universtiy was capable of the practical end of things...they,d be done much better in an IT or FÁS Centre.

.....Saying all that though I've got a decent job that I enjoy from doing the course,and the holidays!!




What would you like to see changed with it if ya were to start again...From what I hear they've changed some of the problems with the manufacturing end

Ginger

slickmcvic wrote: »

What course did you do?

Was it relevant and is it related to what your doing now?

What were the positive and negative aspects to your course?

What would you like to see changed with it if ya were to start again?

.....I'm just a disillusioned graduate btw no a member of SS!!

I did Comp Sys and graduated in 2001. The course has changed a lot since then. We kept saying that the FYP was weighted high enough and thankfully they have changed that since I left.

Relevant ... Yup, most of it anyways. Some stuff not so sure, PISE for one. Purely because of the lecturer and also due to the amount of work for such little reqard. But then again it is required to have the course accreditted IEEE. Needed to supplement some stuff.

Positive.. Good grounding in computer software design, Co-op gave me excellent experience. Lecturers actually listening to you in 4th year. Tho I didnt spend a lot of time in lectures in 4th year.

Negative.. Some of the maths modules were impossibly tough, we did ask that the 1st year maths modules get swapped so that the computer maths was moved to the second semester, purely so people wouldnt get turned off when they saw their first maths lecture. Some lecturers causing us grief and fairly 70% of a 4th year class. Spending 48 hours straight finishing my FYP including doing DJ support for the frames and djing doing Rag Week .

When we left we gave in a few things which we saw were wrong and that possibly should have been changed. Thankfully they did.

Other than that, I did really enjoy my time in UL. Good fun.

Sabre0001

slickmcvic wrote: »

What course did you do?

Like bluedolphin I'm in my final semester - Business Studies (Major: Marketing, Minor: Entrepreneurship)

slickmcvic wrote: »

Was it relevant and is it related to what your doing now?

Not sure what I want to do next year...But everything does include Marketing of some sorts (including CV's etc.) so I'm happy to say that it's relevant

slickmcvic wrote: »

What were the positive and negative aspects to your course?

Positives: Co-Op, Practical modules, Not overburdened by hours.
Negatives: Some pointless modules (particularly the one's that all of business had to do together), initial class size seems too big (maybe that's just me being overly quiet though).

slickmcvic wrote: »

What would you like to see changed with it if ya were to start again?

Course was changed anyway and made better; i.e. Majors picked sooner, FYP optional.

rorymagory

What course did you do?

Finished in 2005 - manufacturing technology (changed to manufacturing systems in 4th year, but i'll always be a mantecher)

Was it relevant and is it related to what your doing now?

I use a pc at work now, i also used a pc in college....

The course title is misleading. The manufacturing sections taught in the course were outdated and irrelevant to what i've seen in industry (still at first job mind so not giving up just yet) No modern topics were taught. The hands-on practical labwork in the course was done on CNC machines 20 years old. We learned off lines and lines of plc code that nobody is ever gonna need to know. The drawing and design parts of the course were great. My next job is gonna be in using them. Basically the parts of the course that should have been emphasised upon were skimmed over in favour of outdated material. 2 of the main topics that will get you a job in manufacturing now would be Lean Manufacturing and 6Sigma statistics. I learned f*ckall about these in my manufacturing degree.

What were the positive and negative aspects to your course?

positive -
as above, the design parts of the course will always be relevant.
co-op can be good if you find the right one (as always its a lottery)

negative -
didnt cover enough industry-relevant material.
in 2004 the government said they wanted more science graduates from universities. As part of this move they decided to change my course name (and probably more) from man. technology to man. systems, changing the degree from engineering one to a science degree. so after all that, i get a poxy science degree(no offence to science grads but it wasn't what i signed up for). unfortunately beacuse we only got a class rep in 4th year (we weren't the most proactive bunch....) we just accepted it.

What would you like to see changed with it if ya were to start again?

Make the course more relevant to what you'll meet in industry

For all the fuss about getting a degree, it'll really only get you your first job outta college (maybe 2nd too). after that its all about how well you can talk up your experience.

Mr. CooL ICE

What course did you do?
Currently in 4th year Computer Engineering

Was it relevant and is it related to what your doing now?
Technically is related to what I am doing, because I am still doing it! But it is related to what I want to do, which is something generally network related. I'm not interested in IT support and just want to go into network design/admin. Luckily, my course has a firm base in hardware too (its strongly linked with electronic engineering), so not everyone is going to be an application developer.

What were the positive and negative aspects to your course?
Positives:
The overall groundwork covered in the course is extremely wide and students have a massive amount of different areas to work in when they graduate.Also, the 4th year modules are pretty interesting so far, and highly relevant to what we are doing.

Negatives:
Programming modules were a bit all over the place tbh. Spent 1st year learning Pascal (irrelevant for anything other than learning) and C, both of which had crap lecturers. 1st sem 2nd year gave us our first decent lecturer, who tought us advanced C, but 2nd semester went downhill. We were supposed to be tought C++, but instead our lecturer spent 80% of class time over the space of the semester talking about robots (irrelevant to us, relevant to his own interests) and merely tought us how to use C++ syntax to create C programs, leaving us with no knowledge of object oriented programming whatsoever. This created further problems when our 3rd year software module assumed we had a full understanding of OOP.
Also, 2nd year gave us 2 unnecessarily tough electronics modules which were totally irrelevant to computer engineers. First year elective module choices were rubbish too.

What would you like to see changed with it if ya were to start again?
Yes, see negative aspects above. Either a different lecturer to teach C++, or teaching another language such as Java which kinda enforces the idea of OOP and takes away the mindset of procedural programming.

slickmcvic wrote: »

.....I'm just a disillusioned graduate btw no a member of SS!!

Yeah. We believe you...

BossArky

What course did you do?

• B.Sc Comp Sys 02
• M.Sc Mus Tech 03

Was it relevant and is it related to what your doing now?

• My work is a lot less technical than studies. Comp Sys was a good background. Living in a student village on a LAN probably taught me more than any course hours I managed to get to (which wasn't many).

What were the positive and negative aspects to your course?

• Class was massive and it ended up to be more "crowd control" in the words of one of the lecturers I spoke to afterwards

What would you like to see changed with it if ya were to start again?

• If I did Comp Sys again I would try to be more socialable with the rest of the class, purely because it is tiresome to always annoy the same people for notes :cool: I would also pay attention in the first 2 years, and probably join a sporting soceity to learn something new.

U.L. rocked! Great time there. No regrets!

Corkette

What course did you do?
Also in final semester Business with Marketing.

Was it relevant and is it related to what you're doing now?
A marketing major is going to be pretty relevant to any line of work because of the skills you pick up, but ya there are a lot of marketing related jobs out there. I have a job secured in advertising which is defo relevant.
I take a different minor option to Sabre, HR, and I can't see it being anyway relevant after college! Possibly having it on your CV will make you more likely to secure a job but there are few practical modules covered.

What are the positive and negative aspects of your course?

Positives of the course are:
Co-Op (although mine could have been more relevant),
Few hours, generally between 15-18 (not that I make most),
Major class size in 3rd/4th year which is small enough for us to get to know each other
Working in project groups (can be seen as a negative too though I guess!)
A nice broad general degree that you can tailor to suit your own interests. I never would have pictured myself in Marketing back when I was filling in the CAO and now I really like it!

Negatives are:
Our huge anonymous class in 1st/2nd year! It's still far too big in the common business modules and involves being preached at by a lecturer who will never even know your name.
Some, though not too many, terrible lecturers.
The sheer volume of outside reading expected in 4th year!
FYP supervisor fecking off on maternity leave.

What would you like to see changed with it if ya were to start again?
I've heard the course has changed since I started and that this years 2nd years can choose not to do an FYP if they don't fancy it. Good idea, think I might do it anyway though.
It'd be great if the class size could be lowered or split or something but I cant see an easy way of ding that.
Overall, I would probably pick the same course again.