[plug] Uni Course - UWA or Curtin?

[Frederic Valton]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Greg Mildenhall" <assassin at live.wasp.net.au>
To: <plug at plug.linux.org.au>
Sent: Monday, November 19, 2001 10:43 AM
Subject: Re: [plug] Uni Course - UWA or Curtin?


> > Neither CS nor IT streams offer any industry experience, which at
> > this late stage in my degree is something I regret.
> 
> Actually, a "practicum" (a minimum of 8 weeks' work experience in an 
> software-related workplace) is now a mandatory part of both the computer
> science and software engineering degrees. You can still avoid it by doing
> a Bachelor of Science or Bach of Comp sci. and Maths.

I'll grant you that UWA is changing its course structure, and a practicum is
now part of the degree, as are a number of new units including 'Professional
Computing' which I presume to be a more vocational unit. The implication here
is that they perceived and are addressing the failings that I mentioned. That
said, the change won't effect this year's bunch of graduates, which is where I
(we?) stand Greg.


> > UWA's CS dept. seems to position itself as an Academic
> > computing department, (you do come out with solid theoritical
> > foundations)
> [but]
> > I'm not sure that UWA does such a good job at preparing
> > it's graduates for the workplace.
> 
> Not for their first job, no, but I think it does a better job of preparing
> graduates for their nth job, when none of the _technology_ they learnt at
> uni is relevant anymore, but the _science_ is as it always was.

I wasn't arguing that a sound theoretical background was undesirable, but that
it would be preferable to be teach it within some relevant professional context
- which other institutions seem to manage quite well.
 
> > The main languages taught (outside of academic languages such
> > as Prolog or Haskell)
> 
> Haskell is actually a general-purpose language, it is just not widely used
> for reasons that escape me. By proportion, it is used a lot more in
> academia, mainly because academia has people that know what languages are
> out there. Also because it is particularly good for teaching, but only in
> the way that it is particularly good for most things.

Remember your words, and in ten years look back and ask yourself how much
you've used it/forgotten... You could prove me wrong ;)

> C++ is taught as a language, (as part of the second-year OOP unit) but
> thankfully all later courses are now based on Java or C instead.

C++ is skimmed over as a language as part of OOP. You couldn't possibly
maintain that a student can program in it with that much exposure. It's useful,
and looks on a CV, as does C and Java. What's more (for all you RTFM declaimers
out there?), the manual is a darn sight thicker than Haskell's.

And no, I do not believe that it is the role of a University to be so
technologically focussed that it's graduates loose their skill set after a few
years (there's TAFE for that), but this view has to balanced against furthering
their employability, particularly in an area which such strong industry ties,
and there's plenty of scope to do both. Not everyone wants to enter research.

On a final note, UWA Comp. Sci. _is_ generally well taught in my opinion, and
it is not my intention here to bag it because of some bad experience there (nor
brag about it out of loyalty either). As you've rightly stated, it seems to be
addressing a few of its shortcomings (perhaps not before time), and over all
does put out a high calibre of graduate.


- Fred Valton

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