[plug] Uni Course - UWA or Curtin?

[fvalton_lists at yahoo.com]

> > I have heard that the UWA CS dept has a lab or two
of dual-boot
> > Windows/Linux machines for student use.
>
>
> I was up there on Tuesday, as a friend of mine had
an exam to study for,
> and he took me for a tour around the labs. All of
the systems that I saw
> were dual-boot with w2k and Redhat (unsure of
version as I'm not a
> Redhat person and didn't actually look into it). The
best thing is...
> they actually teach some of the students how to use
it :o). I saw 4 labs
> and all of the systems in them labs were dual boot.

That's right. RedHat 7.0, but they seem to update
every summer.

As for the courses:

Neither CS nor IT streams offer any industry
experience, which at this late stage in my degree is
something I regret. Spoke to someone from Edith Cowan
last week and they were attached to a company for
their database course and working on an Oracle
project: I think that could be very beneficial both in
terms of professional contacts and workforce
experience.

Yeah UWA has UCC. It's quite removed from the CS
building though, and few of the students seem to be
involved. Not quite sure what its catchment is (maths?
engineering? physics?) - it's not enough to pick UWA
for in my
opinion.

UWA's CS dept. seems to position itself as an Academic
computing department, and if that's your thing (you do
come out with solid theoritical
foundations) then it could be for you. CS is also in
large part, and for most, a means to an end, and I'm
not sure that UWA does such a good job at preparing
it's graduates for the workplace.

Teaching there as anywhere varies in quality. Most
lecture material is handed out, and labs and tute
sheets are available on the web. Tutors can be Honours
or PhD students, or the lecturers themselves. There's
a strong in course assessment emphasis (up to 50% of
any unit, but never less tham 40%), in line with the
need for hands on programming experience. The main
languages taught (outside of academic languages such
as Prolog or Haskell) are VB, Java, and ANSI C.
Scripting languages such as Perl, Javascipt, ASP,
PHP, etc. are just not covered - the assumption is
that if you've mastered higher order languages, you
can teach yourself the rest (I did do some UNIX
scripting, but that unit seems to have bitten the
dust). The omission here is C++.

In summary, I'm reasonably happy with UWA, and think
that it compares favorably; however, were I to choose
again, I think I might pick Curtin Uni. from what I've
heard from other students, and for its perception by
Industry.

- Fred Valton


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