3rd Year Computer Science Choices

FreeOSCAR

Question for anybody who has done or completed 3rd year comp science.

I was just wondering out of the three choices in semester one, which ones contain the most theory work? I dont really like programming so if i wanted to do as little coding as possible which two should i pick?

If you could explain what the general goings on in all 3 of them are, that would be a huge help.

Stench Blossoms

You do all of them at the beginning and then get to pick the one you want to drop.

So try them all out and see which one you dislike most.

If you don't like programming I suggest you drop games.

Creamy Goodness

the most theory based - Software and knowledge engineering nice big english words strung together making it seem very conveluted.

the most practical - games, you're given the game engine and make your games from there.

the inbetweener - computer systems administration and Architecture. half and half, if you have use linux in any shape or form for about 2 months this shall be a breeze subject.

you pick one to drop, you don't really have to choose that early either, think it's sometime in october.

FreeOSCAR

Cheers guys much appreciated. Good to know you can have a feel for them before making your choice.

What are the other 4 core subjects like? I liked SE in 2nd year and Databases aswell. Wats damians and sjds subjects like?

Creamy Goodness

UI programming, is just that, you make User Interfaces with java. i really didn't care much for this subject tbh, i'm not a huge fan of java. i see the point in java, i just don't see why it is introduced this late and for so little time.

software engineering III is a complete mess. it's all over the place and has no structure whatsoever.

damien bourkes Client-Server Programming is a good think imo. the classes are the same format as data comms in year two (ie. with the slides etc), and the labs mainly certain around socket programming.

database technology good subject taught well, only downside that i saw was due to modularisation my year did **** all SQL. database technology started on day one with full blown SQL.

FreeOSCAR

Cheers cremo thats sounds cool. One last question, did you go on the work experience in semester 2? If so how does it work? Can you pick were to go if you have a place lined up or does the college decide?

And how do you get marked on it? Surely the only way you could fail it if you didnt give a toss or you had bad time keeping.

Creamy Goodness

yes i'm currently on the work placement.

you don't get to pick where you go. Mark Deegan does an excellent job in finding companies willing to take on 30 students and you have to do a minimum of 6 months, some people are doing more and if the company asks you to stay on until you go back to college you have to.

Mark collects your CV's and sends them out to the companies, they reply to him and then he tells you where and when your interview is.

you can suggest a company to Mark but to be fair game he sends everyones CV to them and they do have to be a reputable IT company.

so it's pretty much complete luck of the draw which company you get and what you will be doing, some companies put you in tech support and some companies put you into development.

for the marking side of things, i think you get marked on the following things i don't have a breakdown for each part.

you do weekly logs every week which you send off to mark.
your manager at your placement will fill out a form sent by mark, practically an assessment form of your performance.
you do a 15 minute presentation when you go back to college in september.

anymore questions just shoot as it's still quite fresh in my mind

FreeOSCAR

That sounds very good, think ill be doing that instead of taking subjects for semester 2.

Do the employers pay you?
Are they obliged to pay you?

Creamy Goodness

FreeOSCAR wrote: »

That sounds very good, think ill be doing that instead of taking subjects for semester 2.

Do the employers pay you?
Are they obliged to pay you?

Yes, another one of the perks of doing Work Placement.

They have to pay you at least minimum wage. Not bad considering that other Work Placement modules in DIT don't get paid.

FreeOSCAR

That really good. Are you enjoying it? Im in a IT support job for the summer and its going well although I feel like im not really utilizing stuff I did in college much. Maybe microprocessors, OS and data comms but not much else.

What did you get sent to do?

Creamy Goodness

i'm a design support web tools designer (long name i know)

basically write programs that work in multiple browsers to allow managers to produce statistics to see where their designers and testers are going wrong.

i'm not too hot on web skills so i wasn't really feeling the job at first, but after the first month or so i love it. the reason for using web based programs was well, these programs will be used in the companies sites all over the world. Pressure

i'm using one language not taught by dit to me yet PERL, and another that was taught in two one hour lectures PHP.

there are a couple of great things about work placement:

* treated as an actual employee, not just some student coming in. i was given tasks to do that regular employees get, but also with the understanding that i may not know how to complete them.

* the pay, i'm on more than min. wage but tbh even if i was getting min. wage i'd still love it, nothing beats getting paid to sit and flex your ideas for 8 hours a day.

* no exams, if you pass all semester one exams you have a nice long break from jan-sept of exams.

* you meet such a diverse range of nationalities. where i'm working there's polish, brazillian, serbian, northern irish, english, japanese, turkish etc... (and irish too ).

sure it eats into your summer by 2 months but when you come back you'll be more ready for a final year project than anyone who stayed behind to do the "team projects" of semester 2.

FreeOSCAR

Yeh man that sounds really cool, i would be interested in doing something like that. And your doing PHP, we done poxy JSP for web dev this year, it was ok but id much rather do PHP.

Ok cheers for the information Cremo, much appreciated.
Im glad I got knowledge of someone who is experiencing the course and not of them stupid course handbooks.

If I have any more questions ill ask you so.

Many thanks again.

Creamy Goodness

FreeOSCAR wrote: »

Yeh man that sounds really cool, i would be interested in doing something like that. And your doing PHP, we done poxy JSP for web dev this year, it was ok but id much rather do PHP.

Ok cheers for the information Cremo, much appreciated.
Im glad I got knowledge of someone who is experiencing the course and not of them stupid course handbooks.

If I have any more questions ill ask you so.

Many thanks again.

tbh i hated php when i done it in college, i know know that it was down to the short time we had at it, it was squeezed in at the end.

jsp would of been cool. the one thing i'm slightly irked about the course is that modularisation came in when i done first year.

first year was way too easy - didn't even do databases, then in second year we just touched sql programming. whereas you going into third year now have a good foundation in database and sql. before i got the job, my sql knowledge bearly went beyond "SELECT * WHERE x = 'somevalue';", for a concept that is everywhere DIT really fecked up with it's course content, although they have fixed it now.

FreeOSCAR

Yeh man you guys had it tough alrite. I saw your web dev for 2nd year and it was a bloody joke how crammed in it was.

First year was very easy I found aswell, second year was ok apart from programming and I think that was only because of the way the subject was run (you probably know what Im on about). I suppose it had its pros aswell.

How did you find 2nd year and 3rd year (S1) in terms of difficulty.

Creamy Goodness

second year was grand although a little disjointed. took a while to get into some subjects and the minute you got to the juicy bits, the semester was over and so was the module.

i have mixed feelings about semester 1 of third year too. it just didn't seem structured enough, and to go from two years of coding in c/c++ to drop it completely was a bit of a shock (might be a bit of fresh air to some though). also due to the majority going away to do work placement, extra pressure was piled on by lecturers to cover even just the basics in their courses as they only had one semester which did lead to having 4/5 projects on going pretty much throughout the year, with 2 to 3 due on the same week.

Irishtrekkie

Cremo wrote: »

sure it eats into your summer by 2 months but when you come back you'll be more ready for a final year project than anyone who stayed behind to do the "team projects" of semester 2.

so can i take it your not a fan of the team projects then ?

Creamy Goodness

no definitely not despite me working in a team of 15 people supporting 200 SW designers :rolleyes:

i'm not a fan of doing little projects that are mediocre and have no real world relavance, and that's what you do in 3rd year semester 2 if you decide not to take work placement.

FreeOSCAR

Plus your making money, experience and in something you really like. Thats what we all want at the end of the day.

strychnine

Cremo wrote: »

no definitely not despite me working in a team of 15 people supporting 200 SW designers :rolleyes:

i'm not a fan of doing little projects that are mediocre and have no real world relavance, and that's what you do in 3rd year semester 2 if you decide not to take work placement.

This couldn't be further from the truth. The team project is the first assignment that you will do that takes you through the entire software development life cycle from start to finish including design, implementation, documentation and critical analysis. Of course the project itself is small but on no work placement will you get to take part in EVERY aspect of a project, you are given specific tasks to do, especially on large scale projects like you said you were working on.

The team project is an awful lot more that just coding an application and it also is a great training oppurtunity for the final year project. Also, most of the apps that were made could easily be applied to small businesses, i.e. video shops or surgeries.

Creamy Goodness

strychnine wrote: »

This couldn't be further from the truth. The team project is the first assignment that you will do that takes you through the entire software development life cycle from start to finish including design, implementation, documentation and critical analysis. Of course the project itself is small but on no work placement will you get to take part in EVERY aspect of a project, you are given specific tasks to do, especially on large scale projects like you said you were working on.

The team project is an awful lot more that just coding an application and it also is a great training oppurtunity for the final year project. Also, most of the apps that were made could easily be applied to small businesses, i.e. video shops or surgeries.

alright far be it from me to actually make comments on something i've never done.

the reason i made the comments above was i saw one of the projects handed out.

basically what it was, was to design and implement a database system for a video shop. now in second year and first semester of third year we dealt a lot with the video shop story. this just led me to believe that it was something to keep ya busy yet lacked any real imagination. And since there were a max of 10 people in semster 2, there would of only been 2/3 of these projects, if the video shop was the best they could come up with well lets just say, i'm glad i done work placement. there are plenty video shop schema available online. i just felt there's no point trying to reinvent the wheel and not get paid for it

although, the above is based solely on having a 20-second glance at the spec sheet.

iUseVi

Cremo wrote: »

sure it eats into your summer by 2 months but when you come back you'll be more ready for a final year project than anyone who stayed behind to do the "team projects" of semester 2.

Boo! Hiss!;)

Cremo wrote: »

alright far be it from me to actually make comments on something i've never done.

the reason i made the comments above was i saw one of the projects handed out.

basically what it was, was to design and implement a database system for a video shop. now in second year and first semester of third year we dealt a lot with the video shop story. this just led me to believe that it was something to keep ya busy yet lacked any real imagination. And since there were a max of 10 people in semster 2, there would of only been 2/3 of these projects, if the video shop was the best they could come up with well lets just say, i'm glad i done work placement. there are plenty video shop schema available online. i just felt there's no point trying to reinvent the wheel and not get paid for it

although, the above is based solely on having a 20-second glance at the spec sheet.

The projects were mostly pretty lame, to be sure. Fortunately my team got first pick this year and got the best one. We did a remake of Sopwith except that we made it into a peer-to-peer network game.

strychnine is right, I actually learned a hell of a lot from that module.

FreeOSCAR: there are definitely some benefits to doing work experience, I think the best one would be the money. But you get to choose your own subjects in the second semester, and there are some pretty nice ones.

For example, I did:
-mobile robotics
-game modding
-computational mathematics
-mobile software dev

I'm quite happy I didn't do work experience, for one you get to finish up earlier than the work experience guys. Also it's fairly easy going (if you don't pick a b***h hard project.) You don't get the benefits of the work experience, but with the the contacts I made in DIT I still got a job for the summer, so really it is possible to get the best of both worlds.

EDIT: Another thing I forgot to mention is that since there are very few people left in the second semester (usually), then you get good chances to talk with lecturers about 4th year projects. (You should start thinking about ideas as early as possible)

FreeOSCAR

That sounds pretty good aswell. Dont think I would be in to the subjects you picked for semester 2 though. But like you said, you can choose what you want.

When was the deadline for making your mind up on doing Work EXP or doing projects?

iUseVi

FreeOSCAR wrote: »

That sounds pretty good aswell. Dont think I would be in to the subjects you picked for semester 2 though. But like you said, you can choose what you want.

When was the deadline for making your mind up on doing Work EXP or doing projects?

Well tbh, the list of subjects isn't that extensive. Plus you have to have a certain number of people pick them for them to run. (Just beat up people and get them to do it. )

Can't remember the deadline, but there's plenty of warning. I went to all the work experience meeting at first, just to keep my options open.

Creamy Goodness

interviews started happening late november/early december so you'd want to have your mind made up by then.

FreeOSCAR

So lads did yous find 3rd year to be a bit handier than 2nd? Did you find it more enjoyable?

iUseVi

Second year was a botch job for us. They crammed a year and a half into one year. Can't really compare to what you experienced. But 3rd year was fairly handy on the whole IMO. Especially 1st semester.

FreeOSCAR

Nice that sounds sweet. Well good for 4th year with your projects in whatever option you choose to specialise in.

Creamy Goodness

3rd semester 1 was nice and dandy imo.

preferred second year subjects though.

Irishtrekkie

Hmm interesting , it will be a hard choice when i have to make it for the work exp , or the project i guess , i mean i wish you could do both to be honest . and i guess with anything , its really how much effort you put into stuff , that dictates what you get out

iUseVi

Irishtrekkie wrote: »

Hmm interesting , it will be a hard choice when i have to make it for the work exp , or the project i guess , i mean i wish you could do both to be honest . and i guess with anything , its really how much effort you put into stuff , that dictates what you get out

I didn't choose not to do work exp because of the project. Most of them are crap - database and Java front end. They would take all of 5 minutes, and IMO are not worth choosing over work exp in themselves.

In case you are interested, the reasons I chose to stay in college:

- I didn't like the sound of the previous jobs - seemed to be mostly CSAA related. Mind you all the best jobs seemed to go first and the jobs seemed to be better this year than the year before.

- I could choose my own work for the summer, plus since I finished earlier I had a couple of weeks break.

FreeOSCAR

Just out of interest, were they offering out any jobs for working with databases?