Soldato
Out of the three Universities I've been at, Nottingham is my favourite. I'm not a computer scientist, but I can certainly recommend the University and the city.
I'd stay clear of a pure CS course without Alevel maths, personally if I where in that situation I'd opt for a 4 year degree with a foundation year.
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Right, firstly before everyone says how I 'should do what I am interested in', I am interested in and have been interested in computers for some while now (obviously, or I wouldn't be here!). Mainly web design and development however. I briefly looked into these as a degree choice however after a few people telling me that this is not a good career to go into due to the high competition and low pay I have decided to choose otherwise.
I am wondering if anyone here could advise me on whether computer science is a good degree or not to take if I'm mainly looking for something that will open many doors (don't want something too specific that will really limit my career path). Also, anyone that has done a computer science degree, what sort of job have you now got as a result? Sorry for all the questions but i'm just trying to find out at this stage whether or not I should maybe change my plans and study something else broadly related to computers.
I always told myself that I didn't want to sit at a desk all day, that I want to be active and obviously.. earn good money however I can't see this being the case in computing!
Anyway.. Due to me not having a maths A level, I am quite restricted to the universities that I can attend and at the moment I am looking at Nottingham, East Anglia, Hull, Leicester and Coventry - has anyone attended these universities either to do a different course or to do something computing based and were they a good choice? I am looking for a university preferably that is quite modern (obviously don't want to be using old old tech!) however I know that being picky about the tech isn't a good starting point when choosing a uni
So yeah.. in a nutshell, I am wondering if anyone can recommend any good courses/universities and let me know their views on both a CS course in general and post university career prospects.
EDIT: I have been told that database management and such is a good job with good pay however is quite boring! Anyone know anything about this? lol Infact, my computing tutor advised this!
Cheers!
EDIT: I have been told that database management and such is a good job with good pay however is quite boring! Anyone know anything about this? lol Infact, my computing tutor advised this!
What area of maths is important? I'm going on a similar course (it wanted ABB, but only GCSE B at maths), but havent done maths for years (I did it literally like 4yrs ago and only got a grade b).
Did Comp Sci myself and most of my good mates at uni went on to work in fields which have nothing to do with Computing.
Wikipedia has a good general overview of CSEdsger Dijkstra stated, "Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."
Pure is the most important, but depending on which Uni you attend you may well be offered additional (optional?) modules based around Statistics.
I'd stay clear of a pure CS course without Alevel maths, personally if I where in that situation I'd opt for a 4 year degree with a foundation year.
^^^ this tbh.....
Go to a proper uni* and do a decent CS course and it will be worth it.
Attending some half-baked course at some second rate ex-poly might well end up with you working on a helpdesk upon graduation which as someone else has pointed out on this thread is something you can easily do anyway without the need for a degree.
(*having said that out of the ones you've listed Nottingham is usually well regarded - don't know about the CS course specifically though)
Personally I think some people are still peddling the ideals of the older CS courses out there. CS has evolved as a subject. Partially because of ex-polys, partly because that's what it has had to do as a subject as computing has become more commercial.
Originally, computer science was indeed effectively a branch of mathematics, and at its very core it of course still is, we cant computer if we cant count! However, even the most gothic universities are rapidly realising that people want their CS degree to mean that investment banks want to employ them afterwards.
And to counter this argument, I did a CS course at an ex-poly, learned a lot, got a high first, went on to get a scholarship to do an MSc at manchester, which in turn led to a NERC funded PhD.
Stafford gave me, somebody who messed up his A-Levels, the chance to prove myself and get into academia as I had always wanted (but thought I had lost the chance to).
Many people who did the CS course with me at Stafford went on to good jobs with Cisco, MS, Oracle, HP, IBM etc.
Indeed, CS students want degrees that are going to get them jobs afterwards, ie one that teaches things like software development, web development, database design and networking, along with the more fundamental stuff like systems architecture, I bet most students couldn't care less about the maths other than the binary/hex representation.