Last weekend I went to the Swinburne University of Technology Open Day, where prospective students get to see what campus life is like. I have had Swinburne high on my list of unis to go to for a while, however Sunday’s Open Day has pretty much convinced me that Swinburne is the uni for me.

The course I was originally looking at was a double degree consisting of a Bachelor of Multimedia (Games and Interactivity) + Bachelor of Science (computer science / software engineering) which looked pretty good. I was also looking at the Bachelor of Computing (Network Design and Security) which shows you how to break into networks and then secure them (Their marketing material featured the tagline “sting the hackers”). After looking at the different courses and talking to a few different people, I found a different course which looks quite awesome: Bachelor of Science (Professional Software Development).

Basically it’s a three year course about developing software, and as well as the three years you do a one-year work placement through Swinburne’s Industry Based Learning (IBL) program. From what one of the lecturers told me, only a small number of people do the course, and when it comes to graduation time, there are more positions in big companies than there are graduates. So, pretty much everyone is employed by the end of the four years. Neat!

As well as talking to people, I also got to see what type of programs that the Professional Software Development students get to write. In the first year one big project they do is an arcade game written with their own SwinGame API. The samples I saw looked pretty impressive. In the second year you get to write your own Peer-To-Peer app, which is even better.

The Open Day was also a good chance to have a look at the accommodation on campus. The student residences are not too bad, small but big enough. There’s a wireless LAN there too, which is very important for me. However internet access is charged at 6c/meg, which might not be too good. Three years of access, averaging about four gig a month, means about $8600 worth of my money is going to The Internet. Pheh. Still, I’ll be damned if I don’t get my YouTube, Google Reader, and Instructables access! The location of the student residences is good too: it’s walking distance from Woolworths, and more importantly, McDonalds and Starbucks. Of course there’s also a cafe and bar on campus, which is certainly nice and convenient.

While I’m not entirely committed at this stage, Swinburne looks pretty good to me. I think I’m going to like studying in Melbourne. Especially if this guy is still the mayor when I get there!

–Ben

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 30th, 2007 at 8:21 pm and is filed under School. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.