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Computer Science
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08-02-2008 12:48pm#1
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Your dad may have been right a few years ago, but much less so now
Comp apps in DCU is nowhere near as widely regarded as it was about 5-10 years ago from talking to a few people I know in HR for various companies.
I'm in my final year of CS here, by the way, so going through various interviews etc. at the moment. With regards to the larger companies like microsoft and google, when hiring graduates both companies work off a university grading scale - so DCU, UCD etc. are ranked as top tier universities, while with google TCD is ranked as an elite university, the only one that has recieved that ranking in Ireland. a similar system exists in microsoft iirc.
Having seen an example or two of the Computer Apps final year exams, the major difference is that their course is more focused on specific technologies, whereas CS is more aimed at teaching the generic theory behind the subject. In my opinion, and some may or may not disagree, the latter puts you in a much better position due to having the background to shift and adjust when necessary. at last count, during my four years we've been taught 7 or 8 different languages
If you have any questions about the course and course material, there are a few good threads knocking around on here, i'll have a search and link them.
hope that helps 0 -
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Hey Mark, I'm In my final year of Computer Engineering which isn't a million miles away from the CS degree you are considering. You were asking about job opportunities, so I can tell you I have 2 job offers for next year. Both are with a big multinational corp, so the jobs certainly are available. And I know of at least one other guy in our class of 8 who has signed his contract for next year (...and its only February). The one big drawback in my course is the lack of an integrated internship or co-op program. I ended up doing two during the summers, which has been really beneficial, both from what I learned and from the position that the experience puts you into when looking for jobs. I don't know if DCU has a placement or not, but either way, doing a good stint in a good setting is a great idea. The postgrad and research opportunities in TCD are, IMO excellent, so thats definitely something else to consider.
As has been said, you don't want to look at college as just purely an avenue to getting a job further down the line (even though that is obviously pretty important), there's a lot more to it than that... and Trinity is a pretty great campus at the end of the day. Cant beat the Pav on a sunny Friday in May!
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newestUser wrote: »The mantra 'DCU is more highly regarded by employers' has been going around for years, and it's never really been substantiated or elaborated on.
I'm presuming it came around thanks to it having the work placement - at least that'd be the logical guess
Personally, I think DCU is more fun and friendly than Trinity. There's a lot of smug, arrogant people in Trinity. Lots of nice people too in Trinity, mind you.
To be honest, i think thats common in every college, you just tend to notice the asshats from other colleges a lot more whenever the college rivalry, which does tend to pop up in conversation from time to time, appears. I'd say of the people i know in DCU, 50% are complete asshats and 50% are nice folk. but thats obviously quite skewed like, so I try not to base my view of colleges off the people you end up knowing from that college 0 -
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Youre all wrong, NUI Maynooth is the place for comp science.
Further proof, may science students winning the imagine Microsoft cup.
Got my Bsc there, i dont think college teaches you anything but about growing up in life
anything ive learned and used in work at all != college . [except this sentence booyaaa]0 -
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cianclarke wrote: »..to be fair when I was putting stuff on my CAO form one of the highest priorities was job prospects. You don't develop any kind of awareness of learning the "art of computer science", or the university learning experience, expanding your mind, all of that crap, until you actually get to university.
Even then, I've been quite disillusioned with all of that idealistic crap, but that's probably just down to CS.
I said you should be applying to a university with an ambition to educate yourself in that particular field of study and not to get a qualification so a faceless company can start you at the bottom rung of the corporate ladder.
If you feel disullusioned, you may want to consider if computer science is really right for you. Personally I'd prefer to be in a class with 5 critical thinkers over 25 potential code monkeys. I know in reality that's not going to happen and they couldn't justify the classes with such poor numbers.
Something interesting to observe. This graph shows the dot com bubble spanning 10 years, clearly peaking around 2000 and then going to the dogs afterwards. Compare to the CAO statistics for CS at the time.
1998: CS 455
1999: CS 475
2000: CS 465
2001: CS 420
2002: CS 345
2003: CS 340
2004: CS 350
2005: CS 365
2006: CS 355
2007: CS 355
You can clearly see it drops a drastic 135 points! It makes you wonder, do you think the dot com crash affected the amount of people who have an interest in computer science... or is it fair to say, the people applying before never had a sincrere interest to begin with!
If I were you, I wouldn't throw my education away for a job. By applying to a university to ultimately get a 'good' job, that's what you're doing. Why not spend 3 or 4 years of your life doing something you're really interested in. You probably won't get the opportunity again until you retire.0 -
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Youre all wrong, NUI Maynooth is the place for comp science.
Further proof, may science students winning the imagine Microsoft cup.
Got my Bsc there, i dont think college teaches you anything but about growing up in life
anything ive learned and used in work at all != college . [except this sentence booyaaa]
Trinity don't feel the need to enter the "Microsoft cup" (surely you mean the Imagine Cup?) This "competition" is essentially a recruitment cum PR campaign by Microsoft. Also, such publicity stunts help them to maintain their political influence on the current government incumbents (i.e. by continually reminding them that Microsoft alone account for 3% of Ireland's total annual tax take).
Trinity are too busy writing papers for respected journals to be engaging in such trivialities.0 -
My advice (as someone who did CS in TCD from 2000-2004 and is now working in the tech industry) is:
- Don't pick your course based on job prospects. Any sensible employer (like me ) doesn't give a toss where you went to college*. All they care about is:
- Can you do the job? Can you code? No, really. Can you write coherent specifications? Do you need hand holding to learn the stuff you don't know or are you good at inhaling the documentation for a new product/technology by yourself? Bonus points if you know the relevant products/technologies beforehand.
- Will you do the job? Are you a lazy sod? Not the good lazy (automating bits of your job) but the type that doesn't get stuff done on time because you couldn't be arsed? Will you put in the extra hours when needed?
- Will you cause trouble while doing the job? Will your personality fit in with the other employees? Are you excessively rude, smelly or intolerant of others?
- Get a job every summer in college. The techier the better. The more experience you have, the less your degree matters to an employer. More importantly you'll pick up the contacts who will get you your jobs after college. Many if not most of the good jobs are advertised by word of mouth before the employer goes to a recruitment agency.
- Learn stuff that you aren't being taught in college. For example, if the college course is heavily Windows based, learn Linux/UNIX and vice-versa. Learn whatever popular languages aren't being taught. Learn the technologies associated with the stuff you're being taught (J2EE/J2ME if you're dong Java stuff, .NET if you're doing C#, etc.).
- Look at the curriculum for each course you're considering. Talk to anyone you can find who has done that course. If the courses have lecture notes online have a look at them, do they seem interesting? Most importantly don't believe a word anyone says about a course they haven't done. Anyone who says "Trinity's course is all theory" or the like clearly hasn't done Michael Manzke's 2BA4 course. Ignore anyone who says "Employers prefer graduates of XYZ" if that person went to XYZ, at best it's confirmation bias and at worst it's outright snobbery**.
- Don't necessarily make your college choice based on where your friends are going but do let the accessibility affect your choice. If you are going to have trouble getting home from college after hours you'll miss out on the social side of college. If you have to get up at the crack of dawn to make a 9am lecture you'll fall asleep in your afternoon ones. There'll be some times when you'll need to spend a couple of hours in a lab with other students, so don't just look at the 9-5 slot that lectures fall into.
* This is not quite true, but if you go to TCD, UCD, DCU, UCC, UL, NUIG, NUIM or DIT you should be fine unless the prospective employer is a bigot.
** Of course you should make exceptions for the ones who have done or are quoting properly constructed, statistically valid, peer-reviewed studies backing up their point. 0 - Don't pick your course based on job prospects. Any sensible employer (like me
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This post has been deleted.
Thanks.This post has been deleted.
I mentioned that because, although I was relatively well informed about the courses I applied for, I was shocked to find out how much I didn't know about the course I ended up doing. You shouldn't be surprised when you see what you're going to study.
By the start of my second year loads of people had left the course. Roughly about half of those who left did so because the course wasn't what they wanted, the rest left because they either couldn't handle the material and failed or thought they couldn't and dropped out. I hate thinking that there were places taken up by people who didn't want to be there which excluded people who did want to be there.0 -
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Señor Juárez wrote: »Realistically that doesn't happen. CS never fills up (I think it has 70ish places?), the CAO points requirement is essentially set by the person who applied with the lowest points, and the required C3 in higher maths. If you get a C3 in higher maths, you are essentially guaranteed to get in, in the current climate of unpopularity.
It was full the year I started which is why I said what I did.
You're right though, nowadays it is a bit different. (Damn it, that makes me sound old! "Back in my day we had to bang rocks together to make 1s. We didn't have 0s either!") 0 -
Señor Juárez wrote: »Realistically that doesn't happen. CS never fills up (I think it has 70ish places?), the CAO points requirement is essentially set by the person who applied with the lowest points, and the required C3 in higher maths. If you get a C3 in higher maths, you are essentially guaranteed to get in, in the current climate of unpopularity.
Does that mean If I get a C3 in Higher Maths, and do relatively poorly in other subjects and scrape 300 points, I get in?
Im not planning on doing that, just want to know how the system works 0 -
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conzymaher wrote: »nowai!
So just show up for Honours Maths exam and then take the rest of June off?
If you're willing to gamble that there aren't 70 people with better results that get there ahead of you then knock yourself out. 0 -
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conzymaher wrote: »Nah, I'm aiming for 450 or so
Good info in this thread, Is it difficult to get an internship / work placement during the summer? Is it better to go to some small company or the old reliables such as Intel, MS etc
It's difficult enough. Most places will only take on students from ITs during their 6 month work placement. A lot of companies also offer 9 month internships which essentially means you'd have to take the year off. You probably wouldn't be qualified for that until you've completed your penultimate year anyway.
If it means a lot to you, I'd really recommend you to Carlow IT.0 -
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My advice (as someone who did CS in TCD from 2000-2004 and is now working in the tech industry) is:
- Don't pick your course based on job prospects. Any sensible employer (like me ) doesn't give a toss where you went to college*. All they care about is:
- Can you do the job? Can you code? No, really. Can you write coherent specifications? Do you need hand holding to learn the stuff you don't know or are you good at inhaling the documentation for a new product/technology by yourself? Bonus points if you know the relevant products/technologies beforehand.
- Will you do the job? Are you a lazy sod? Not the good lazy (automating bits of your job) but the type that doesn't get stuff done on time because you couldn't be arsed? Will you put in the extra hours when needed?
- Will you cause trouble while doing the job? Will your personality fit in with the other employees? Are you excessively rude, smelly or intolerant of others?
- Get a job every summer in college. The techier the better. The more experience you have, the less your degree matters to an employer. More importantly you'll pick up the contacts who will get you your jobs after college. Many if not most of the good jobs are advertised by word of mouth before the employer goes to a recruitment agency.
- Learn stuff that you aren't being taught in college. For example, if the college course is heavily Windows based, learn Linux/UNIX and vice-versa. Learn whatever popular languages aren't being taught. Learn the technologies associated with the stuff you're being taught (J2EE/J2ME if you're dong Java stuff, .NET if you're doing C#, etc.).
- Look at the curriculum for each course you're considering. Talk to anyone you can find who has done that course. If the courses have lecture notes online have a look at them, do they seem interesting? Most importantly don't believe a word anyone says about a course they haven't done. Anyone who says "Trinity's course is all theory" or the like clearly hasn't done Michael Manzke's 2BA4 course. Ignore anyone who says "Employers prefer graduates of XYZ" if that person went to XYZ, at best it's confirmation bias and at worst it's outright snobbery**.
- Don't necessarily make your college choice based on where your friends are going but do let the accessibility affect your choice. If you are going to have trouble getting home from college after hours you'll miss out on the social side of college. If you have to get up at the crack of dawn to make a 9am lecture you'll fall asleep in your afternoon ones. There'll be some times when you'll need to spend a couple of hours in a lab with other students, so don't just look at the 9-5 slot that lectures fall into.
* This is not quite true, but if you go to TCD, UCD, DCU, UCC, UL, NUIG, NUIM or DIT you should be fine unless the prospective employer is a bigot.
** Of course you should make exceptions for the ones who have done or are quoting properly constructed, statistically valid, peer-reviewed studies backing up their point.
Yeah great post, thanks! Any idea on where the lecture notes are? I looked around the TCD site for a while, stumbled upon the past papers for the exams on Computer Science (which I found quite helpful/interesting) but didn't manage to find the lecture notes.0 - Don't pick your course based on job prospects. Any sensible employer (like me
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conzymaher wrote: »Well thats good
Once I'm not greeted with that on my first week!
That was third year stuff, first year stuff is much easier.conzymaher wrote: »Hopefully the noobies are eased in slowly? Or thrown in at the deep end?
Depends on your definition of deep. How tall are you? Some people find first year so hard they give up, some find it so easy they don't turn up.
Here are the slides for a first year course.0 -
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