[plug] Uni Course - UWA or Curtin?

[Ryan]

Over the last few days lots of people wrote:
 > lots of stuff related to the topic

Considered the Business School at Curtin?  As long as you steer clear of 
the eCommerce related streams (purely my opinion), you tend to get taught 
useful stuff.  Almost every job you get will be in some way, shape, or form 
supporting business, so it isn't a totally stupid idea  :)

If you do Commerce (IT + IS), you only have to do all the commercy stuff 
for the first semester.  The courses are probably more analysis and design 
focused, but I still ended up doing a heap of useful programming.  The fact 
it is a Commerce degree is quite misleading, after the first semester you 
wouldn't know it has anything to do with commerce ... and in the true 
spirit of the stereotypical 'geek' it's pretty easy to pick the eccentric 
IT staff from the standard Business School staff, so that surely has to be 
reassuring :)

The business school has a habit of totally restructuring the IT courses 
whenever they get a spare moment.  This had a few drawbacks for me as I had 
to repeat credits for some lost units which no longer qualified for my 
degree, but on the whole it kept things rather well up to date including 
some industry projects.  I'm hoping they have fixed up the streams now so 
people don't suffer like I did with worthless credits.

There is a whole lab of FreeBSD machines at Curtin in the business 
school.  Downside is only 1 unit (network admin) is taught in 
it.  Everything else, Perl, C/C++, Java, Oracle etc. are taught in an 
X-term lab connected to an ancient dual processor SparcServer running SunOS 
named 'isis' (they have a nice simple naming scheme there, the old devel 
server they had that *was* isis is now called 'waswas')

Ryan