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Applied Computing or Software and Systems Development
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I'd just like to vouch for Media that the I.T. courses focus a lot less on the "pure programming" modules, and that these modules are what you'll need in order to actually make anything.
MOC, Media said "For the love of god stay away from IT
. SSD or applied all the way. Even Entertainment Systems." I thought he was saying to stay away from all of the programming courses for a moment too, but if you read over it again, you'll see that Media just meant the I.T. course. I disagree with the "even entertainment systems" part, as the best final year project of this year came from ES and a friend of mine has done the course. Honestly, ES seems like the "fun" course, in the sense that you get to go to competitions and the like in fourth year. It certainly beat sticking around WIT all day!
And I.T. certainly does focus a lot less on programming than any other computer course. I just graduated from my fourth year in SSD and one of the guys in my class (who hates programming and has admitted that he isn't good at it) switched from SSD to I.T. when fourth year started (You can do this because both I.T's and SSD first three years are a level 7, level 8 is your add-on year). He was much happier in I.T. than he ever was in SSD. He just couldn't program and hated it, the Business side of computing was more of his thing anyway, which he certainly enjoyed more.
We shared non-programming modules with them, and they had extra non-programming modules (Something to do with Web Services that we didn't do). We had extra programming modules. I don't know the full make-up of I.T., but SSD focused on Databases, Business-related stuff and programming.
We learned Database theory and languages (If you'd even call SQL a language.) as well as how to set up a data warehouse and how to be the administrator of a database(fancy way of saying how to fine-tune a database because they're useless).
We learned Business software and for some reason had to do profit and loss accounts in second year. The software was much more endurable thank god, it's called SAP and you'll learn how the logistics of product creation operate. For example, product A needs parts B and C. How many should we sell before giving out a discount?
We learned various filler modules, which probably account for an extra year. Critical Thinking, which is a lot like English I suppose... Maths in first year, German in second and so on. They seem to drop these after second year. The Security modules popped up later on in fourth year as well. They weren't as "filler-y" as German, etc, but they still seemed out of place. Fun though!
The core of SSD was programming. We always had at least one module of programming in every semester. We did a huge amount of Java programming for the first three years, as well as various bits of web programming (PHP, HTML, JavaScript) and did Android programming for third year. In fourth year, we learned Rails, Ruby, JSP/Servlets and learned more about how to make an API in Rails.
I have a feeling that Applied was basically SSD without the Business and filler modules (As we never shared those classes with them), but with a lot more programming-related modules, like cloud stuff. It was meant to be much harder than SSD due to having one less year to get that level 8, and I remember hearing that they were given more privileges than the other courses.
WIT also tried to give our SSD degree title away to Chinese erasmus students, but our class rep kicked up a storm about it and we ended up merging with the Chinese erasmus students, much to the Chinese university's dismay (They were promised all sorts of stuff that they never got). We were supposed to end up with the I.T. courses title on our degree's and were told that we could tell employers to ring up the year head to confirm that we had actually done the SSD course. You can imagine the problems that would have caused us, and that would never have happened with the Applied course.
I should probably mention that I know of plenty of students who learned how to pass assignments, but not how to cope with programming. There is a former Applied student who (I have heard) is way in over his head at a new job because he isn't actually any good at programming in the real world. A three-year level 8 is no good if your skills aren't up to scratch unfortunately...
Anyway, this post has rambled on a bit too long and has made me want to work on a project of mine, so while the mood has me... I'm off!
Good luck!0 -
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