A university with a real Computer Science course

Hello,

I'm just finishing my UCAS application, and I still have one more university to choose. My predictions are BBB-AAB and I have a pretty good PS, and I'd like to study CS. What I'm looking for is a real CS course, not IT.

For the moment I've chosen Bath (actually I'm not that sure about this one), Edinburgh, Nottingham and York. If you could recommend me some university with a good CS course (i.e. with some emphasis on Mathematics among others) that I could realistically get in to, I'd appreciate it a lot. :smile:

Thank you very much in advance!

(edited 12 years ago)

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Queen Mary uni

Original post by SecretDuck

Queen Mary uni

I checked their website and the course seems alright. I was thinking maybe I should take CS & Maths, but I'm not sure what to expect really. Although I'm not bad at all at Mathematics and am quite fascinated by it, I guess I'm slightly intimidated by that part.

Also, out of curiosity, why did I get a thumbs down? Did I say something wrong?

Reply 3

skunky x

Reading? I'm here and one of my friends is third year CS and he seems to be constantly programming.

Reply 4

-kit-kat-

Original post by hoffa

Durham have quite a bit of maths...also, at Durham you have to choose two "elective modules" in addition to your core ones, and lots of the CS lot choose Discrete maths or something so you can do as much maths as you like!

As for the thumbs down thing, it was probably because your post sounds a little belittling and arrogant, although I realise it was probably unintentional :smile:

Reply 5

hypercaine.

Youve got to be careful, theres a lot of fake courses out there... :rolleyes:

I think youll find pretty much every CS course is completely different to IT.

If you want a lot of maths then obviously apply to more traditional universities as they will focus more on theory. Im at Durham which is supposed to be very theoretical and in first year I did one maths module but some of it was also used in other modules but thats it really. If you want loads of maths why not just do maths? :confused:

Reply 6

hoffa

Original post by skunky x

Reading? I'm here and one of my friends is third year CS and he seems to be constantly programming.

I'm not sure I want to be programming the whole time, so I don't that's for me.

Original post by -kit-kat-

Yeah Durham seems nice, I'll look into it some more.

Also sorry if my post sounded arrogant, I read it through again, I can see why and edited it. I really don't want to find any excuses, but I'm a foreigner applying to UK and it takes some time to get entirely comfortable with the language.

(edited 12 years ago)

Swansea

Original post by hoffa

I'm not sure I want to be programming the whole time, so I don't that's for me.

Why don't you do a degree in Mathematics? it is clearly what you want to do.

Reply 9

easyman123

Original post by hoffa

Next time when you submit to the forum, you should think and express your words carefully. It would be better if your submission included bad grammar or spelling mistakes then being arrogant.

Reply 10

hoffa

Original post by freedom1

Why don't you do a degree in Mathematics? it is clearly what you want to do.

No it's not, really. Partly why my PS is pretty good is because I have a very good background to computers and I've done a lot things. There's nothing wrong about programming, I like it a lot, I've written numerous programs already but it's not programming itself that I'm interested in. As Dijkstra nicely put it, "Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." And my main interest is not the telescopes.
So what I'm looking for is computer science indeed, but with a mathematical side to it (i.e., computer science).

(edited 12 years ago)

Reply 11

hypercaine.

Id also like to point out that Bath require AAA and its quite competitive, when I applied (I applied to Bath too) the course looked very good and it has some great links with industry.

The quote from your PS is hardly great either, youve just made a list and not expanded upon any of it at all, this doesnt show anything to the admissions tutor. Unless youre going to develop the point, what is the point?

Reply 12

freedom1

edited

(edited 12 years ago)

Reply 13

hoffa

Original post by hypercaine.

Original post by Zamolxes

I'm taking Computer Science at King's College London. We don't have any courses that are called math-whatever, but every single course requires a very firm understanding of maths, logic, algorithms, bases, how a computer represents numbers (binary) or floating point numbers (IEEE).

Computer Science isn't about studying mathematics, it's about learning how a computer works. If you have a lot of separate mathematics courses that aren't applied in computers at all then after you finish your degree I will sit you in front of a computer and you won't be able to program ****.

If you want a really good CS course I would recommend Imperial, if you want to be close to industry you really need to be in London. Though I doubt that with your grades you could get into Imperial, but you should still try to aim for London.

Thank you, I looked at KCL's course and it seemed very interesting. I already considered it before, but now it actually looks a lot better than earlier. I think I'll apply there. :smile:

(edited 12 years ago)

Reply 14

Zamolxes

Original post by hoffa

Well it gives a general overview of the things I'm interested it, but it's only a fraction of the PS. I develop more specific projects I've done in later paragraphs. Concerning Bath, yes I'm removing it from my choices, it indeed seems very competitive, and it'll be hard to get an offer with such predictions.

Thank you, I looked at KCL's course and it seemed very interesting. I already considered it before, but now it actually looks a lot better than earlier. I think I'll apply there. :smile:

Yeah no problem, just a bit of what you can expect.

The first semester you'll have

ELA - Elementary Logic with Applications - It's mostly Predicate and Propositional logic, inference and natural deduction, eventually you'll get to proofs, definitions etc, we use logic as well as calculus/differentiation, complex numbers and things like that.

FC1 - Foundations of Computing - Which is basically based on Discrete maths, if you don't know what it is you can look it up. Basically sets, functions, algorithms, trees/graphs/etc which help you understand how data structures are represented inside the computer system.

CS1 - Computer Systems - In which you learn the bases, base2 and 16 are the useful ones. You learn how to convert, how to perform arithmetic in various bases, how numbers are represented in the computer system like I said earlier IEEE 754 and all those standards for floating point, 32 bits for single precision, 64 bits for double etc. In CS1 you'll also do a bit of C programming which includes a few sorting algorithms, nothing too complicated (ie bubble sort or quicksort). In CS1 you also learn all about the computer system/architecture, memory, various equations to determine computer efficiency, some basic algorithms we use for cache accessing and things like that.

You'll also need to do a bit of Assembly language and machine code and understand a bunch of different types of architectures.

PRP - Java programming introduces you to programming and more specifically to object oriented programming (which is the new way, if you only program in C you may just be lagging behind with the rest of the world). Programming in Java isn't very difficult and it doesn't require a lot of maths, in fact most high level programming languages don't. But you do need to understand how objects, classes and methods work as sometimes they can be a bit abstract.

A lot of the maths tends to happen at the lower level of programming while high level programming resembles human language a lot more. Obviously you'll need to know basic maths but you won't need Calculus to program in Java, make an iPhone app or even a game.

This is just the first Semester...the second one you do Databases (which is very complicated and very maths based, you best familiarise yourself with recursive algorithms), Artificial Intelligence, more advanced java programming and a different kind of programming we call declarative which is different from procedural programming like java, c, c++, etc.

By the second year you'll JUMP a lot and the learning curve tends to be much steeper, and this is only King's. Imperial does some crazy ****.

I wouldn't recommend queen mary, I hear they do a lot of maths which you don't even need for computers, and you really need to focus on Computers if you are to understand it, trust me it's complicated ****.

P.S - KCL (and London in general) is also very good in getting an internship/job, we get offers every day and we have so many industry links. So getting to know people at really great companies is easy as we always have events, as long as you know your **** you'll find it very easy to get a very good job. King's College London has one of the best graduate employment rates as well as one of the best graduate prospects, as we tend to get good jobs as opposed to working at tesco.

(edited 12 years ago)

Reply 15

hoffa

@Zamolxes: Oh wow, thanks a lot, it looks even more interesting now frankly. I'm certainly applying there. In fact I've chosen my final choices, which are York, Edinburgh, King's College, Nottingham and Manchester. Sending my application in a few hours. :smile:

Thank you very much everyone (and sorry again if I seemed arrogant at first), hopefully I'll get a few offers! :smile:

Reply 16

-kit-kat-

Original post by hoffa

I'm not sure I want to be programming the whole time, so I don't that's for me.

Yeah Durham seems nice, I'll look into it some more.

Also sorry if my post sounded arrogant, I read it through again, I can see why and edited it. I really don't want to find any excuses, but I'm a foreigner applying to UK and it takes some time to get entirely comfortable with the language.

yeahh Durham is really nice!

haha, dont worry about it! you asked why you were getting thumbs down...thats the only reason I mentioned it!

good luck with everything :smile:

Reply 17

skunky x

Original post by hoffa

I'm not sure I want to be programming the whole time, so I don't that's for me.

I think Comp Enj has a lot of hardware stuff if that's what you're looking for.

Reply 18

ch0llima

I'm honestly flabbergasted that nobody in this thread has yet blown the Oxbridge trumpet to the point of blacking out. I have to say that I'm not bowled over by the course content offered by either (Oxford is overly theoretical to the point of being dubious in terms of its usefulness, Cambridge tries to scattergun too much and doesn't have an obvious focus on anything) and that it's another one of these things which trades on name, to be honest :flute:

@OP - you're not going to see a "pure" CS course these days because the nature of the subject matter and industrial applications have changed too much. CS was originally taught as what it actually is - a subset of mathematics. As it happens, computer science departments as you now know them really haven't been around for as long as you'd think. Many of them didn't appear as separate entities until the 1980s and up until then were under the auspices of maths and/or engineering.

CS wasn't originally all about graphics cards, programming and networks. It was more about data structures, formal logic and algorithms which, these days, are still (debatably) important but generally form a much lesser part of the course structure because it's not seen as important.

Original post by skunky x

Reading? I'm here and one of my friends is third year CS and he seems to be constantly programming.

Unfortunately, basically all computer science degrees are like this and you will find a disproportionate amount of the practical work involves writing some kind of code. This is why you will often find most CS graduates are looking for generic coding and software engineering roles, simply because it's all they really know and all they're prepared for in the real world. It's not that they get these jobs, it's that they're deliberately looking for them without considering anything else and I think it's a shame that such a wide field forces its graduates down such a narrow path.

I think that's a very sad situation and a damning indictment of how CS is taught in this country, but each to their own opinion :moon:

Once you're in the real world of computing, it's all down to experience. As a hypothetical interviewer, I don't care if you have a First from Imperial - if the self-taught dropout has more practical and directly relevant skills than you, he gets the job. A lot of "old school" CS courses contain a lot of theoretical fluff which you are guaranteed to never, ever use.

Spoiler

(edited 12 years ago)

Reply 19

stifa

I would advice you to change your PS or to remove every trace of it in here, because the plagiarism control UCAS uses whilst processing the applications might return results based on what you posted here.