rhul for year 2011

bean3

Hi anyone thinking of going to royal holloway sep/oct 2011?

Reply 1

grape:)

Well I hold a deferred entry.

Royal Holloway

Egham

Visit website

Reply 2

antipesto93

i am, for computer science ! :smile:

Reply 3

Pavan.R

antipesto93

i am, for computer science ! :smile:

Me too

It's my first choice, hopefully I get in :smile:

Reply 4

dkdeath

antipesto93

Pavan.R

If you have any questions about the cs course at Rhul feel free to contact me . :wink:

(edited 13 years ago)

Reply 5

Pavan.R

dkdeath

If you have any questions about the cs course at Rhul feel free to contact me . :wink:

You'll regret saying that! :P I just want to know what Uni is like?? How is the course taught? What sort of things do students do? :smile:

Reply 6

lareneg

Pavan.R

You'll regret saying that! :P I just want to know what Uni is like?? How is the course taught? What sort of things do students do? :smile:

Each week we have lectures for each module:

3x 1hr Mathematical Structures
2x 1hr Robotics
2x 1hr Object Oriented Programming (Java)
2x 1hr Databases (SQL)

And we have practical lab sessions in a computer room:

1x 2hr Robotics
1x 2hr Object Oriented Programming
1x 1hr Databases

This will change for the second term, as we will do different modules then (you can find a list of all first year modules here).

In lectures, obviously, we just listen and make notes. We have lectures all together (I think there are just under 100 students this year), and are split into groups of 20-30 for lab sessions. On the whole, I find the lecturers easy to follow except for the maths one - he moves a bit fast, and assumes that everybody picks things up really quickly... I think many people in the class are struggling. Lab sessions vary from module to module - in databases, we're just planning databases individually at the moment. In robotics, we work in pairs building and programming robots, and will have a group assessment in a few weeks. In OOP, we work individually through exercises which get us used to programming and the basics. If you already know Java or C++, you'll probably find first year programming a bit boring.

The university as a whole is nice. Out of all the universities I visited, I feel that RHUL has the nicest campus by far - there is a lot of greenery, and it's generally very pleasant. Founders is also a very nice building. However, I've found that the facilities here are slightly lacking compared to other universities - for example, at Newcastle the Computer Science department has many large new computer clusters dedicated to Computer Science students. Whilst we have dedicated facilities, the building interior is nowhere as nice as other universities I've seen, and the facilities aren't as extensive. That said, Computer Science is a subject not entirely dependent on facilities and I use my own computer and laptop most of the time out of lectures anyway.

P.S. - internet in halls is blazing fast. At night / in the mornings when not many people are using it, you can get 80-90mbit speeds.

Reply 7

Pavan.R

lareneg

Woooaaahhh Thanks :biggrin:

This has been really useful, helping me understand what really goes on :smile:

I was going to say, I plan on buying a very powerful laptop before I start so I mean any facilities that lack wouldn't be much of a problem. I guess as long as teaching standards are good, students should be able to do the work :smile:

Thanks again for all the info!

Reply 8

lareneg

Pavan.R

Woooaaahhh Thanks :biggrin:

This has been really useful, helping me understand what really goes on :smile:

Thanks again for all the info!

You don't need a powerful laptop to be honest - you could easily get by with a netbook. All you need is something which can run an IDE (e.g. Eclipse). I personally have a PC and a portable laptop (Lenovo Edge 13), which makes it easy to carry around with me.

It's worth noting that the computers in the library fill up very quickly - I don't know what the computers in the Computer Centre are like in terms of availability, as I haven't been there yet...

You don't actually need to log on a computer to print something - you can send a print job from your own computer, and log on to a panel next to the printer to release the print job at your own leisure. For example, if I need to print anything I send the job from my halls room then go to the library and release the job there.