{"id":580,"date":"2011-07-06T13:26:00","date_gmt":"2011-07-06T13:26:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/studentblogs\/2011\/07\/06\/06072011\/"},"modified":"2013-06-07T07:56:31","modified_gmt":"2013-06-07T07:56:31","slug":"06072011","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/studentblogs\/06072011\/","title":{"rendered":"Computer Science is not for the faint-hearted"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If there&#8217;s anything I&#8217;ve learnt this year it&#8217;s this: Computer Science is not for the faint-hearted. I&#8217;m talking about things like artificial intelligence, networking theory, compiler engineering&#8230; these are all difficult subjects for instance. I hear some people complain that these subjects are useless. I disagree however because I think it depends entirely on what field you are going into. I think it is still possible to excel in them with a lot of diligence (but also possible to fail them). I am pleased with my score of 68.5% (Upper-second or 2:1) for Year 2; rumour has it that this is the most difficult year!<\/p>\n<p>Despite the vast workload in Year 2, the good side to it is that we have had a good mix of theory and practical; this is what makes ECS a good place to study \u2013 your skills are almost instantly transferable as far as I can see because you have used the theory and the tools. Put it this way, my inbox doesn&#8217;t seem to pass a day without receiving an email about an internship or a graduate offer with a company.<\/p>\n<p>These are the courseworks I have done this semester:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Software Engineering Group Project: Worked as part of 4-person team to develop a teaching tool for airport classifications. We used Java and Java2D to implement it. In addition: design patterns, metrics and formal technical meetings. The project was documented throughout thanks to an Agile development process. At the start and the end of the project lifecycle, we gave a tech demo of our product to the client.<\/li>\n<li>Artificial Intelligence: Coded and trained a 2-D <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Perceptron\">perceptron<\/a> to classify data in Matlab; applied it to <a href=\"http:\/\/archive.ics.uci.edu\/ml\/datasets\/Molecular+Biology+(Protein+Secondary+Structure)\">Qian and Sejnowski&#8217;s data<\/a> to sub-classify protein structures.<\/li>\n<li>Distributed Computing: Coded a distributed notification framework; wrote a desktop Twitter-esque application which can be used for newsfeeds etc.<\/li>\n<li>Compiler Engineering: Designed and coded a basic compiler for Pascal code in Java with ANTLR.<\/li>\n<li>Database Systems: Designed a MySQL database for a dancing school and wrote a PHP interface for it.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>As you can see, I have been busy!<\/p>\n<p>Now that I&#8217;ve had a bit of break, I will be starting my placement with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.roke.co.uk\">Roke Manor Research<\/a> in Romsey on Monday. I&#8217;m afraid that I can&#8217;t say too much about what I&#8217;ll be doing there due to confidentiality and non-disclosure etc. but I can tell you that I will be working in the Cyber Security department all being well. Hopefully with the appropriate moderation from my manager, I maybe able to to let you know more information!<\/p>\n<p>My pearls of wisdom are this for Year 2: Work hard and go to lectures. Going to lectures in term time is the best form of revision for the exam.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If there&#8217;s anything I&#8217;ve learnt this year it&#8217;s this: Computer Science is not for the faint-hearted. I&#8217;m talking about things like artificial intelligence, networking theory, compiler engineering&#8230; these are all difficult subjects for instance. I hear some people complain that these subjects are useless. I disagree however because I think it depends entirely on what field you are going into. &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":307,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[33308,33311],"tags":[374,434,431098,428162,431099,431149],"class_list":["post-580","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-electronics-and-computer-science","category-southampton-university-life","tag-code","tag-computer-science","tag-first-results","tag-modules","tag-second-class","tag-software-engineering","column","twocol"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s3BSCk-06072011","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/studentblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/580","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/studentblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/studentblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/studentblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/307"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/studentblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=580"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/studentblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/580\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1450,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/studentblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/580\/revisions\/1450"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/studentblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/studentblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/studentblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}