Computer Science vs Joint Mathematics and Computer Science

Hi! Hope your first year went well!

This was originally meant as a pm but since this is a new account I am apparently not allowed to.

Anyways, I was wondering if JMC students in Imperial can switch to Math after the first year?

You should also know both Oxford and Imperial are really difficult to get into for JMC so would be useful to have other unis for backup. The average MAT score you need for Oxford to just get an interview for JMC is actually higher than the average MAT score for a pure Maths offer-holder which is crazy. For Imperial if you're applying to JMC you are basically competing with the Computer Science students when applying as well. You'll have to do a pre-interview online problem solving test and then for your offer you'll have to usually get a grade 2 in Step 2 in addition to your A-level grades (although quite a few, if not the majority of people got high grade 3s in STEP this year and were still let in). For Imperial most people do get rejected pre-interview... this year we were told there were almost 4000 applicants to the computing department and around 500 or so offers were given... after STEP around 230 or so people got in. Also if you do apply for JMC but change your mind during the first week of the course you can switch to pure Computing fairly easily at Imperial. Good luck with your application! Any other questions let me know

Update a year later - got an offer for JMC at Imperial!

Hi, I'm a first year studying JMC at Imperial.. so started a week ago. One thing you probably should know if you do choose JMC and get into Imperial or Oxford you are signing yourself up for a crazily intense workload... most people doing Maths or Comp Sci here agree that JMC is probs the toughest degree you can choose at Imperial in terms of workload and conceptual difficulty so you do really want to be sure you are up for that. You are basically for the first 2 years at least doing around 70 percent or so of the modules a Maths student would take and around 70 percent a Comp Sci student would take. From the very first week our workload is really intense already. The biggest advantage of JMC at Imperial is you can later skew your degree to whatever you are more interested in.. so you can do more comp sci or more Maths if you want in the later years. Also in terms of career paths you basically have everything open to you within Maths and Computer Science. Probably the only downside is since you are basically in 2 different departments, we got told the Maths and Computing department may not always communicate so there may be times you'll get a lot of coursework due for both subjects in a short period of time. But yeh, the advantages are endless and everyone here is super smart so you'll be in a competitive environment. Of course I'll assume the Oxford course would be very similar.