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Recommended supercurriculars for computer science at top Russel group universities

Hi, I'm a year 12 student studying maths, further maths and physics. I believe that my predicted grades will be A*A*A and I'm planning to study computer science at Warwick, Sheffield, bath, Bristol and another undecided university.

However I've only got a few extracurriculars e.g. dofe and volunteering, but the only supercurricular that i have related to computer science is that i took part in senior maths challenge where i only got a Bronze award, and provided sessions in school on computer science topics.

Is there any extra recommended supercurricular/extracurriculars i can do over the summer holidays to strengthen my personal statement to get offers from the top universities for computer science.
What are some recommended books, podcasts, lectures to look over to do with computer science?

Thank you

Reply 1

aranon

Original post by qwewfghehrguoheg

Hi, I'm a year 12 student studying maths, further maths and physics. I believe that my predicted grades will be A*A*A and I'm planning to study computer science at Warwick, Sheffield, bath, Bristol and another undecided university.
However I've only got a few extracurriculars e.g. dofe and volunteering, but the only supercurricular that i have related to computer science is that i took part in senior maths challenge where i only got a Bronze award, and provided sessions in school on computer science topics.
Is there any extra recommended supercurricular/extracurriculars i can do over the summer holidays to strengthen my personal statement to get offers from the top universities for computer science.
What are some recommended books, podcasts, lectures to look over to do with computer science?
Thank you

do some MOOCs, build some programming projects. see if you can get some work experience, and in terms of books to read, look at the suggested reading lists of the universities that you're interested in

Reply 2

qwewfghehrguoheg

Original post by aranon

I've recently signed up to the Harvard CS50 course, i'm still trying to find what recommended books to read as it doesn't mention it in any of the university websites

Reply 3

kvas_ua__

Original post by qwewfghehrguoheg

I've recently signed up to the Harvard CS50 course, i'm still trying to find what recommended books to read as it doesn't mention it in any of the university websites

Clean Code by Robert C. Martin

Reply 4

aranon

Original post by qwewfghehrguoheg

I've recently signed up to the Harvard CS50 course, i'm still trying to find what recommended books to read as it doesn't mention it in any of the university websites

Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford
super-curricular_suggestions_0.pdf (cam.ac.uk)

Reply 5

Danstrat61

I did get a Warwick offer and my supercurriculars were reading The Code Book by Simon Singh then coding some stuff based on that. I also watched some videos and video series then coded stuff based on them. People are probably right that MOOCs are good ideas.

The videos I watched were 3blue1brown's series on neural networks (I didn't actually code something for that one) and a video on the Fast Fourier Transform which I did then code up. Obviously you don't want to do exactly these but I would really recommend The Code Book if just for reading by itself and YouTube is a good starting point for exploring lots of topics. Since you don't do CS already, definitely try to do some substantial programming project.

Hope this helps.
(Full disclosure, I did also apply to Bath and didn't get an offer so if you're really set on there then feel free to ignore this xD)

Reply 6

qwewfghehrguoheg

Original post by Danstrat61

I did get a Warwick offer and my supercurriculars were reading The Code Book by Simon Singh then coding some stuff based on that. I also watched some videos and video series then coded stuff based on them. People are probably right that MOOCs are good ideas.
The videos I watched were 3blue1brown's series on neural networks (I didn't actually code something for that one) and a video on the Fast Fourier Transform which I did then code up. Obviously you don't want to do exactly these but I would really recommend The Code Book if just for reading by itself and YouTube is a good starting point for exploring lots of topics. Since you don't do CS already, definitely try to do some substantial programming project.
Hope this helps.
(Full disclosure, I did also apply to Bath and didn't get an offer so if you're really set on there then feel free to ignore this xD)

Thanks. Btw I'm still not advanced on programming yet as I'm still half way through the harvard cs50 intro to python course
After I finish that course is there another good course to complete, which is not too challenging

Reply 7

Danstrat61

Original post by qwewfghehrguoheg

Yeah it doesn't have to be advanced, as long as you show you're interested in the subject. Mine wasn't really advanced, I only spent maybe a couple of hours a week in the summer on them, what I did for the cryptography stuff just counted how often letters appeared and were next to each other and had the worst text based UI ever.

Reply 8

Danstrat61

Spending the time to learn a new programming language is definitely a substantial project.

Reply 9

KWad

Yep, the advice has been pretty good. Doing a mooc, CS50 especially, is a good idea. Try and get your hands on some books, try to make an interesting personal project, etc.

A note on the personal project - rather than doing multiple small 100liners, one or two more impressive projects will probably be more interesting on the personal statement, so pick a specific thing you want to make and invest a fair bit of time on it.