Quite a few people have mentioned that I seem pretty stressed out and unrelaxed (if there is such a word) recently, so I guess I’d better explain why:
House
Still haven’t found a house for next year, there don’t seem to be any two bedroom flats anywhere in Manchester, and the few that are available aren’t really aimed at students so they’re either ready for rent now or not until later in the year. I’ve spotted the occassional nice place but they’re quite a bit more expensive. I could always stay in Bury over the summer whilst I look for somewhere but that would really screw things up socially (buses to Bury stop at about 10:30 at night I think, and I don’t really fancy a 50 minute bus ride after being at the pub anyway) as I want to keep going to Megs and Warped during the holidays.
Exams
These are really stressing me out at the moment, mainly because I can’t seem to sit down and make myself revise and even when I do none of it seems to sink in. I also run out of time in every exam, even when I try and give the right amount of time to each question (based on the marks they’re worth), and I still feel I haven’t written enough. It’s so demoralising when you know the material (or at least enough of it to have a decent stab at answering the question) but you just can’t write fast enough to get the material down onto the paper in front of you. I got hammered in Networks last semester and I’m sure a lot of that was down to the fact that I couldn’t finish the last question in time, despite the fact that it was based on DNS which is one of the areas where I’m fairly competent and know most of the terminology.
Thankfully my exams are spread out over three or four weeks, which is good because it gives me a bit of time to revise in between each one, but to be honest I’d rather they were all just in one week so I could get them over and done with and stop worrying about them.
Course
I guess it’s a bit late to be thinking about this, but I am beginning to wonder whether I made the right decision to take Computer Science as a degree. As anyone who has known me since college/high school will tell you, I’ve always been into computers, mostly on the software and web side. However, my course content isn’t really covering either of these two topics in any depth—for example we’ve done one module on C/C++ (probably one of the most important languages out there given that most big/popular applications are probably written using at least some C) and, other than the endless Java that is stuffed down our throats, we haven’t covered programming either in breadth or depth. As for web stuff, other than my third year project and a really simple web site assignment last year we haven’t done anything on that front. I know people who aren’t even doing computer science who get to do more web-based stuff than I do. 🙁
I know there has to be some compulsory units that no-one likes that supposedly prepare us for the “real world”, such as Software Engineering, and to give us professional certification from the likes of the IEE and the BCS – I can deal with those. Looking at the modules for next year though, which I have to pick from soon so that the department can timetable everyone, there don’t seem to be any that spring out at me and say “yes, that’s what I really want to learn more about”. I like the look of the Distributed Operating Systems module, particularly because that’s an area I know the basics of but I’ve never really studied in depth. The only other two modules that look reasonable are taught by lecturers that I really don’t like or who I’ve found not to be particularly helpful in the past when I’ve asked them about course-related things. A lot of the modules also seem to be taught only by one lecturer, rather than my previous modules which have often had two, three or even four different lecturers. Whilst this means we’re not chopping and changing between different people, it is a bit of a gamble because if you don’t understand/get on with the lecturer you can’t go and ask one of the others to explain it in a different way that might make more sense.
So, I don’t really know what to do at the moment. I don’t want to change courses and effectively throw away two years worth of work (which is what I’d be doing, it wouldn’t count towards my degree if I changed and I haven’t really learnt enough to say the two years were a worthwhile use of my time) but at the same time I don’t really want to continue on a course that I’m not enjoying just because I feel obliged to. There is also a course that I’ve seen—Law and Politics (right up my street, two subjects that I’m interested in, always read/write about and might like to persue a career in)—that looks inviting but I doubt I’d be able to get on it this late in the year. I guess the best thing to do is to speak to the third year tutor in our department, which I’ll probably do once exams are over.
Holidays
The last time I can remember going on holiday (by this I mean a break anywhere, not necessarily a week in the Maldives or something like that) was to Euro Disney in year 8. That was seven years ago. I’m too old to go with my family now (they are going away for a week, but I’d be bored senseless and anyway my sisters get to have separate rooms if I don’t go which probably means a lot to the older one because she’s getting to the point where she doesn’t want to share her room anymore), and to be honest I wouldn’t want to anyway. I could just pick up a backpack and go trekking across Europe or something, but that’s not really my style and I wouldn’t know where to go anyway. I’d like to jet off to somewhere like the USA, just to see what it’s like and maybe drop in on people, but I think that’s probably a bit out of my budget. In all likelihood I’ll probably disappear off to somewhere like Wales for a weekend because I quite like it there, especially places like Llangollen where it’s fairly quiet but there’s also a number of things to do.
sigh I’m just a bit fed up that everyone else seems to be enjoying themselves and getting what they want and not really stressing about too much. I guess that’s partially a consequence of having social groups where most of the members are no longer students (other than Gareth, out of all the people who regularly attend the Megalomaniacs I’m the only student, and the last couple of weeks at Warped I’ve been the only person in the middle of exams). Perhaps I should have got involved more in other activities this year (apparently there’s fencing lessons once a week at the Athletic’s Union, which is something I’ve always wanted to try out—good opportunity to keep fit and being fairly small, fast and nimble it might be a sport that I could play with some degree of skill :), but then I never seem to have time, although I am planning on dropping some of my responsibilities (PASS for a start) next year in order to free me up to do other things.
Anyway, apologies for the reflection, I just needed to get this out of my system. I’m going home this weekend so perhaps I’ll be able to relax a bit whilst I’m there. At the very least I won’t have to worry about making meals so that’s one less thing off my mind temporarily.
On a final note, I’ll be reinstalling my server tonight in order to put FreeBSD on it and also solve some of the problems I’ve been having (most notably the fact that the server time keeps slipping backwards and for some reason ntpd doesn’t seem to work properly in Gentoo) recently. As a result, most of my sites will be down whilst I’m working on this, you might be able to resolve the domain names and email will still work as that’s on another host, but everything else will be unavailable. Hopefully I should be able to get everything fixed tonight seeing as I have all the configuration files from my existing setup so it’s just a case of backing up, wiping the disk, installing the software from scratch and then merging in the old configs.
Erm, I’m not. And I think some people are just exceptionally good at handling stress and hiding things well.
I need a holiday too 🙂
You should be stressed too, I mean, who puts the content of his blog into the summary section of the feed.
tsk.
Whoa, pretty serious stuff.
Just to let other people know, I also did Computer Science at Manchester Uni, and I also really hated the course content. So much so, that I decided to transfer to Manchester Met and carry on the course there (well, I’m doing Computing now, rather than Computer Science which at Man Met has a load of boring Maths).
Sure MMU hasn’t got as good a reputation as Manchester Uni, but there are far more course options to choose from, and I was able to pick topics I was really interested in. One of the best decisions I ever made.
Manchester Uni really should think about revising their course content if its having this effect on people 🙂
Regarding the C/C++ stuff it doesn’t look to me that most stuff is done in it. Java and C# seem to be more popular at the moment.
As to the course content – don’t worry about it. Some of the stuff you get taught is completely useless, but some of it I’ve found quite usefull – Class diagrams (UML) I find usefull for software design.
And if you’re not sure about certain lecturers bear in mind that a fair few of the people on UA/Warped-disc went through the department – shortlist a couple of lecturers and you might get some usefull feedback.
Just to add my tuppennorth:
I went through Manchester Uni CS and only got a 3rd. I suspect I’d have got a much better grade at the end if I’d gone to (say) MMU.
I wouldn’t swap it for the world, though. You may have had only one course on C, whatever, but you’re being taught the underlying theory in a much more structured and sensible way than other universities.
What this means is you’ll be able to go out into the real world and learn a new language for a specific project easily. This is because you’e been taught the paradigm rather than just one implementation of it.
I think tom makes an excellent point:
Having now finally finished my degree – today, i’m certain i’ve learnt far more useful things in terms of actual use outside the education in my free time, rather than taught stuff.
But Teaching the latest technology just for the sake of it doesn’t make much sense, in 5 years it’ll all be old hat, or if your employer changes to somethign weird and wonderful etc.
My courses this year have been mostly dull, but the final year project really has made it useful an interesting, all self-taught stuff but good.
They could teach you C++ to death, but it’d not exactly be useful.
Oops, sorry about that! Should be fixed now, the summary will give you the first 255 characters of the post and the content will give you the rest (might change this at some point to make it use the first paragraph or something as a summary).
I’m with Paul on the issue of C/C++ and Java.
Java at the moment seems to be popular for quite a large range of projects, and it is certainly up to the task in a lot of the things that it is being used for, but C and C++ will always be more widely spread than it. This is simply because there is less pissing about in them and I would love to see someone do some low level programming in either. C/C++ hits a nice sweetspot on ease of coding for the programmer and the force that they wield, if you want to write code as high level as Java than you can do, and you can do even more complicated things, if you want to drop down to assembler then you can be there in two seconds. This is where the power comes in, you can code at the level you want and you can switch levels at will.
C# (which addmittedly I have only looked at in for a short period) and Java both have the problem of producing reams and reams of code which has the advantage of looking verbose but in reality can end up being even more of a headfuck than some lines of C/++.
Finally there is the excelent excuse that you do not need a virtual machine to run C/C++, I would love to see someone try and run some Java code on the PSP without the support of Sony.
This is mostly the reason that I lament what our department is teaching us, there is a lot of stuff out there that I would like to get involved in, but all the crap that we have got taught is completely useless to making any headway in it at all.
If the stuff that they are teaching us is going to be useless in 5 years time then why the smeg not teach us something that has been around for decades, is here now and will stay useful for what will be many years to come.
Ok, now the site is back up time to clarify a few things:
First of all, the C/C++ stuff was just an example, I don’t think we should necessarily be taught one language in depth, but I do think our course doesn’t really give people much experience in any kind of programming—despite the fact that a lot of people haven’t even seen source code before they get to university. Then again that’s what I’m mostly interested in so if there’s little of it involved it’s easy to get bored. I don’t want to do a course completely built around imperative programming, but it would be nice to get more hands-on skills within the degree course rather than buying a load of books and trying to teach myself (which is probably the slowest way to learn).
My third year project looks a bit dull, but I haven’t spoken to the supervisor about it yet seeing as he was away in America for two weeks and it’s now exam time. If I can somehow get him to re-interpret the project description to be something more interesting/challenging then that would be a start.
Well to be fair it’s only had this effect on two people that I know. 🙂 They have changed the first year syllabus quite a bit to cater to people who haven’t programmed before but then that has the downside of patronising everyone who already knows what variables and functions are. I guess you’re always going to disappoint someone though no matter how carefully you structure the course.
“I would love to see someone try and run some Java code on the PSP without the support of Sony”
Not really any more of a problem than running C—use the GNU Compiler Collection’s Java stuff 🙂
“Not really any more of a problem than running C—use the GNU Compiler Collection’s Java stuff :)”
Umm, yes it is. The GNU Java compiler will still compile to bytecode, the PSP can only run ELF executeables that are targetted at the MIPS 4k4 core, the only parts of GCC that can do this are the C and hence the C++ portions. Even they had to have quite heavy modification to create code that worked.
Even if you somehow managed to get the Java compiler to produce compatible machine code you would not be able to do all that many useful things. A lot of the stuff is handeled by the built in library functions which have to be defined in the header files along with their addresses, parameter lists and callbacks, java would definately not like that.
Also we really should stop overwunning Paul’s blog, and he should hurry up and sort out threaded comments 😛
Hmm, I actually just guessed there but there are Free Java virtual machines available (the recent Apache announcement springs to mind). They are open and would require porting to the platform with no intervention from Sun.
Just because the official Sun VM is closed source doesn’t mean you’re out of luck 😉
> summary stuff in Atom feed
Ahh, much better.
You’re allowed to put html into the content so it doesn’t look all bunched up, you know 🙂
Ok, summaries should now work properly (before I was letting some HTML stuff slip in, which meant that if the cutoff was in the middle you got half a quoted entity which isn’t really very good :). I’ve also made it so that the XHTML shows up in the content part, right pain in the arse to get working because you have to strip everything in the right order for it to work and validate, but I think I’ve got it right this time.
If it doesn’t work, let me know and I’ll have another stab at it.