Tertiary and Continuing The IT Thread

[Chief]

All things IT.

Discuss courses, unis, subjects and the rest.



For a start - database normalisation. I seemed to fly through that when I was in Uni, while others floundered badly. It seemed to click with me.

Our lecturer said quite plainly that you either got it or you didn't. That he could only show us the tools and notation standard and couldn't teach us the actual knack of doing it.

 

[dwigt]

A lot of people struggled with normalisation at my uni because databases was a first-year, first-semester class, and naturally there are a lot of people who turn up expecting to be designing games and writing facebook clones in their first week, and soon get found out. Could be the reason why computer science dropout rates are so high.

Operating Systems, now there is a boat race of a subject. Scheduling algorithms, deadlocks, memory management, basically all the most boring concepts you could think of.

 

[pieman123]

do you guys think it will be too hard to do an IT course at Uni if i havent done IT in year 11 and 12?

 

[dwigt]

Not at all. I took very little out of high school IT and do fine at uni. If you're interested in computer science it's probably more important that you have a strong maths background. IT, not so much, but it's still handy. Most university level IT courses will have a lot of international students (mainly from Asia), who tend to excel at programming-type tasks and struggle at tasks that require good English skills (Analysing and interpreting specs, writing reports etc), so good English skills always come in handy too.

 

[Chief]

We had computers in our house since I was in primary school - remember the TRS80? We did very little IT in high school - there was no dedicated ICT subject in grade 11 and 12. It was actually a part of the maths curriculum, writing Pascal programs etc.

Just get into it.

 

[AG]

I only did one real IT subject during my commerce degree but it was very,very basic. Business Applications Analysis and Design, pretty much using Microsoft Access to make your own database. It was good though. I'd imagine high level database subjects would be very hard.