Common course

Wondering where to start your studies? Chris Taylor has a few good ideas.

For those of you in your final year of secondary education, the time for selecting a university course – assuming that’s part of your plan, obviously – is fast approaching. And so, this month we’re looking at the most popular technical courses. These are courses available at many universities throughout Australia. While the units (individual subjects and electives), majors and minors on offer may vary considerably from institute to institute, the core of the course shouldn’t. The information presented here should hold true whether you’re looking at Monash University or the University of New South Wales.

Computer Science
Just as the name of the course implies, computer science is a veritable feast of heavy theory on the development and use of computer hardware and software. You’ll want to do computer science if you’re at all interested in getting into cutting edge fields like robotics, bioinformatics and artificial intelligence. Some universities, including RMIT University in Melbourne, even offer games development majors. A computer science degree is a very versatile course and no matter what institute you’re with, you’ll find a plethora of interesting units available covering such topics as cryptography, graphics, human-computer interaction and computational neuroscience (the science of using computers to model the human brain). Depending on the institute, you might be roped into doing some sort of ‘communications’-focused unit – an issue we’ve discussed at length over the last few months.

As a student of computer science, you’ll be doing a lot of programming in a lot of different languages. And you will, no matter your chosen path, gain a solid understanding of exactly what makes computers tick. If you think computer science is for you, a word of advice – figure out exactly what you want from it and select electives accordingly. There are just so many specialist units available with this course that it’s easy to walk out of university three or four years after you started with a qualification that’s not focused on anything in particular because you let yourself get taken in by a lot of different fascinating units without first thinking about where they’d take you once you finished your studies.

In terms of entry requirements, computer science, like pretty much every other degree out there, will want you to have the equivalent of a 50 per cent mark – a pass, in other words – in at least one of your state’s year twelve English units (in Victoria, at least, that means you’d need a study score of 25 in English, ESL and/or Literature). And you can bet your arse you’ll need an intermediate or advanced maths unit to your name. Rare is it to see universities actually require you to study information technology in year twelve.

Information Systems
Most information technology courses out there will include a unit or two on information systems as core, but it’s possible at some universities to become a specialist in this field. Essentially, information systems is the study of how data, information and users interact with each other in a given environment – say, for instance, an insurance company. Information systems courses can best be described as the bastard offspring of the information technology and business faculties. Over the three years you’re at university, you’ll frequently be moving between those two buildings to attend lectures and tutorials.

Also, this field, in case you haven’t realised, places great emphasis on being able to communicate. An information systems specialist isn’t the kind of guy who just locks himself away in an office while he codes non-stop for days, fuelling himself on an unholy cocktail of caffeinated beverages, MSG-flavoured instant noodles and Skittles. That’s not to say he’s any less of a problem solver, though.

Assuming you’re going to be studying full time, an information systems degree should take you three years to knock over. In that time you’ll cover project management, systems analysis and design. You’ll probably have to do a unit or two on technical writing, too, as pumping out obscene amounts of documentation for all sorts of stuff is definitely part of the information systems specialist’s job description. You have been warned.

Entry requirements? Doubtful they’ll demand much in the mathematics department. Being able to speak and write English would probably help.