Who has a Computer Science Degree?

Unconditional said:
To the people who have done/are doing a comp sci degree...

Would you recommend doing a Bsc/Msc or PHD. Ideally I want to do a Bsc as it means I can get in and out of uni as quick as possible and hopefully with not too much debt, but is this likely to put me at a disadvantage when it comes to job hunting as I will up against Msc/PHD students?
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I am doing the Msc mainly because it offers an industry placement. This is a very good way to learn, and might even get you a job in the company when you graduate. It is only 1 more year, and in some cases is very worth while.

daven
 
I am in my 4th year of doing nothing :p I should have gone to the military really, oh well, I am sure my kids are going to be like me, spoilt, lazy, stupid, useless litle brats :D
 
I've applied to do computer science. First choice York, second Bristol (so anything could could tell me would be appreciated Psyk). Was wondering what people did with regards to placement years, were they useful to help you find employment afterwards? Or is it more useful to do a PhD if you wish to further your knowledge? As the lack of a placement year is what I am not liking about Bristol.
 
I did the course at Warwick for a year (started Sept '04), didn't enjoy it, dropped out and now I'm in the RAF.

Go figure.
 
i'm very currently awake having spent the night working on my final year project for a computing science degree at the university of manchester (IST)
if you're interested in computers then you'll get annoyed by the people who arent
having a masters or a PhD may put you in better stead for jobs initially, however as with most of these things, if you graduate with a bsc, by the time you would have graduated with something higher you'll probably be on an equivalent if not increased salary to if you'd started with that higher qualification
damn that doesnt make sense :s
essentially it will depend how much you enjoy your 1st 3 years of uni as to wether you want to spend another year or 4 in education
personally i'm bored of uni, 3 years is long enough to pick out all the cracks in how things are run
I'm looking forward to getting things over with, getting a real job, and earning money rather than just spending it

on the original subject i've found my course interesting on the whole, but it's very subjective, dont take module descriptions at face value, just choose a course that you'll get on with the stuff the best, and in a location you'll enjoy, i applied for almost entirely campus universities and ended up at umist through clearing, but i've loved manchester and plan on staying up there for the meantime
 
Programming - difficult to get in, unless you're *really* good
Tech Support/Admin jobs - why do you need a degree for those?
Research - like programming, you have to be *really* good, and be an academic in your approach to work
Consultancy - not really about the tech skills, more about understanding the nature of IT and morphing it so that it generates value (real or imagined) to a customer

I tried all of these routes, in the end I ended up to be the guy that tells the chief system architect what system is required off him :p
 
I did CS degree at Portsmouth.

Course was ok and some of the subjects were very interesting. Sadly I found it all depended upon what staff member you had for each module as to weather it was worthwhile or not.

I went into the programming side a little more which looking back was a mistake as I'm not amazeingly gifted that way, if I could do it again I would probibly do another course more specialised in one computeing field rather than the "jack of all trades" CS course. Unless you can really look at yourself and understand what each course entails it's hard to say which before hand thou.

The company I did my year in industry with offered me a job. It's not ideally what I want to be doing but it does all count towards experiance for getting the right job later on. Been here for 22months now includeing my industrial placement, will be haveing a think about my future in the next few months.
 
I did a comp science degree at Heriot Watt university in Edinburgh.

It was ok, standard fare covering similar things that other people have mentioned in this thread.

I didn't really enjoy it but that's more to do with the university / attitude there than the course. The life I had out of university (new friends, shared flats in city centre etc) was far more rewarding to me than the course.

As for job prospects, I have to say that people from our course did pretty well. We all got jobs within a 6 month period of graduating and the starting salary was ~20k average. (this was back in 2001).

What I have found is that most of us have now hit a salary cap of around 30k in our prospective jobs and getting higher up the chain involves going into a management role and leaving the more 'technical' aspects of the jobs behind. This is in edinburgh though so scale the numbers up appropriately for south of the border.

I don't think it really helped me (or many of the folk I know) in terms of job skills. Everyone is either in sysadmin or programming roles. The programming was obviously given a bit of help with the knowledge of common data structures from the degree course but in real life they don't help much (most are available as standard libraries or functions) so...

If you're going into academia or research or a 'heavy' programming job (microsoft, linux kernel stuff etc) then it's a must but I suspect for the large majority of IT workers it's a bit superfluous. However, worth it for the piece of paper that says you have a degree..it opens a lot of doors.

As has been mentioned though if you're already handy with computers then expect to get sick of the sight of them and / or become quite jaded about the whole thing :)

If you are handy with computers, I'd seriously consider doing a degree in something else and then you will have your degree in that field *and* strong computing skills to arm yourself with. Rather than just slightly stronger computing skills.

It's something I wish I'd done...I took computer science as the easy way out. I was good at computing, had enough knowledge to coast through for the first couple of years and didn't know what else to do with myself. If I'd done something else (accounting, architecture / construction, a non computer based science, even law with a mind to specialise in IT) then I would have those skills and practically all the computing skills I have as well. It would have opened up a lot more doors further down the line.

But I'm a bit jaded about the whole thing so...

Pre university (at high school) I was :

- working part time for my mums work doing windows admin, networking, dbase stuff

- in my spare time running my own linux box for mail, web hosting etc

- looking after and helping with lots of other folks servery things

Post University (i.e now) I :

- work full time doing windows admin (but not at my mums work ;) ), networking, unix admin

- in my spare time run a small bsd network for shared hosting

- help other folk (both in their work and personal projects) with network and servery stuff.

- starting to get into 'technical architect' roles. i.e speccing out and designing complex redundant systems rather than actually implementing them myself.

So there's not been much divergence. However, this could speak more of my own particular skills and drive than the relevance of a computing degree.

Good luck whatever you decide.

Kev
 
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eztiger said:
I did a comp science degree at Heriot Watt university in Edinburgh.

It was ok, standard fare covering similar things that other people have mentioned in this thread.

I didn't really enjoy it but that's more to do with the university / attitude there than the course. The life I had out of university (new friends, shared flats in city centre etc) was far more rewarding to me than the course.

As for job prospects, I have to say that people from our course did pretty well. We all got jobs within a 6 month period of graduating and the starting salary was ~20k average. (this was back in 2001).

What I have found is that most of us have now hit a salary cap of around 30k in our prospective jobs and getting higher up the chain involves going into a management role and leaving the more 'technical' aspects of the jobs behind. This is in edinburgh though so scale the numbers up appropriately for south of the border.

I don't think it really helped me (or many of the folk I know) in terms of job skills. Everyone is either in sysadmin or programming roles. The programming was obviously given a bit of help with the knowledge of common data structures from the degree course but in real life they don't help much (most are available as standard libraries or functions) so...

If you're going into academia or research or a 'heavy' programming job (microsoft, linux kernel stuff etc) then it's a must but I suspect for the large majority of IT workers it's a bit superfluous. However, worth it for the piece of paper that says you have a degree..it opens a lot of doors.

As has been mentioned though if you're already handy with computers then expect to get sick of the sight of them and / or become quite jaded about the whole thing :)

If you are handy with computers, I'd seriously consider doing a degree in something else and then you will have your degree in that field *and* strong computing skills to arm yourself with. Rather than just slightly stronger computing skills.

It's something I wish I'd done...I took computer science as the easy way out. I was good at computing, had enough knowledge to coast through for the first couple of years and didn't know what else to do with myself. If I'd done something else (accounting, architecture / construction, a non computer based science, even law with a mind to specialise in IT) then I would have those skills and practically all the computing skills I have as well. It would have opened up a lot more doors further down the line.

But I'm a bit jaded about the whole thing so...

Pre university (at high school) I was :

- working part time for my mums work doing windows admin, networking, dbase stuff

- in my spare time running my own linux box for mail, web hosting etc

- looking after and helping with lots of other folks servery things

Post University (i.e now) I :

- work full time doing windows admin (but not at my mums work ;) ), networking, unix admin

- in my spare time run a small bsd network for shared hosting

- help other folk (both in their work and personal projects) with network and servery stuff.

- starting to get into 'technical architect' roles. i.e speccing out and designing complex redundant systems rather than actually implementing them myself.

So there's not been much divergence. However, this could speak more of my own particular skills and drive than the relevance of a computing degree.

Good luck whatever you decide.

Kev
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I think your spot on about the 30K cap minus management. That's what I'm on after 2 years graduated in Glasgow and now fitting into a project management role to surplus my salary.

I enjoyed my course, Glasgow University offers one of the few computnig science courses in the UK which places a lot of empthasis on real life software processes and object orientated design principles within a practical environment. Definetly put my in good stead within my career.
 
I am in my 2nd year of CompSci at Warwick, and its been pretty hard for me so far.

As others have said, most of the things you learn you will never use in life... and there is tonnes and tonnes of maths.

OCdt Stringy said:
I did the course at Warwick for a year (started Sept '04), didn't enjoy it, dropped out and now I'm in the RAF.

Go figure.
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Did you happen to use the DC hub? If so what was your username - just trying to work out if I ever talked to you.
 
2:1 from Nottingham in Computer science, graduated 2001.

Work for a telco startup since I graduated (amost 5 years now!). I walked into a job after making contacts during my year in industry (worked for Nortel Networks).

Skidd.
 
Zirax said:
On the whole the most handy part was being made aware of software development procedures (ie the system life cycle).
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Bleurgh - the traditional SDLC. They've (collectively) spent about 30 years trying to make that work, and it still doesn't. :)

For those among you who want to look at what other options there are, try agile methods. I've been using Scrum for the last three months, and while I admit to being highly skeptical at the outset (who likes change, anyway), it seems to be working in areas where the SDLC didn't. Haven't spent enough time using it to iron out all the bugs yet though.
 
Berserker said:
Bleurgh - the traditional SDLC. They've (collectively) spent about 30 years trying to make that work, and it still doesn't. :)

For those among you who want to look at what other options there are, try agile methods. I've been using Scrum for the last three months, and while I admit to being highly skeptical at the outset (who likes change, anyway), it seems to be working in areas where the SDLC didn't. Haven't spent enough time using it to iron out all the bugs yet though.
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I was a 'traditional' developer for many years, but we've just moved over to agile methodology. I was very skeptical at first, but it seems to work quite well.

I remain to be convinced of its merits for enterprise scale development though.....
 
There are 5 guys on my team. 1 has a masters in Maths from Durham, two have Comp Sci degrees from a Poly and one has lots of management experience. I have plenty of tech experience. We all earn the same thing. Go figure.

Interestingly enough I dropped out of my Comp Sci degree to work full time. I want to go back and finish it or do another degree but it would be out of personal pride rather than to further my career as they're a dime a dozen where I work.
 
We use XPlanner.

I don't think I could cope with the whole paired programming thing evangelised by the agile methods purists, but we've taken just enough so that it's useful without getting in the way.

Anyway, this is getting a bit off topic (my fault). :)
 
Danger Phoenix said:
I am in my 2nd year of CompSci at Warwick, and its been pretty hard for me so far.

As others have said, most of the things you learn you will never use in life... and there is tonnes and tonnes of maths.



Did you happen to use the DC hub? If so what was your username - just trying to work out if I ever talked to you.
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Hey im a CS at warwick as well, only first year. Not really enjoying it at all and deeply considering dropping out. I dont know whether its this specific course/uni but allot of people i know throughout all the years hate the course here.

I wouldnt even know where to begin not being in education though :( How do you go about getting a job without a degree?
 
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Berserker said:
In all honesty, at least 80% of what I've learned I've never used since, and except for the entry requirements I could have easily done the job I'm doing now without. This may just be me though - I pick up computer stuff relatively easily - to the point where I've been known to correct lecturers' mistakes. :o

University did pretty much land me the job I've got now, so I'm not saying it wasn't worth it.
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Couldn't agree with you more. I have worked on some software systems at my University (i.e. proper work - non-academic) and I used very little of the skills I gained from my computer science degree. That 80% is extremely useful at Masters level and beyond.

I think a degree does help to get you into a job and I'd like to think that it shows that you have the ability to handle a wide variety of scenarios.
 
Im at the end of first year now doing Comp Science at Newcastle Uni. So far its been a mixed bag really.. Lots of maths modules and lots of theory. I had been programming for years before I went to university so the programming modules I found quite easy. I think the general consensus on the course is that most people find it quite hard at times. I know a quite a few people have switched to the easier Information Systems Degree at the end of the first semester.

Apart from that I enjoy the course and find it really interesting. The job prospects seem to be pretty good if you can get a 2:1 or First, because its a very numerical degree it makes it easier to move into other sectors as well.

As other people have said, the degree is more theory than practical applications.
 
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