Apologies for the third awful pun involving Swinburne, but it seems fit that I use as many lame puns as possible while describing my uni experience. It seems like Swinburne has a real love for them (Ama-SWIN Race, Swinergy, among others).

Anyhow, I just finished my first week as a first-year Professional Software Development student. My impression so far? It looks like this will be good.

The subjects I’m doing:

1. Computer Logic and Essentials - This is going to be a very theoretical subject, with the focus on maths and logic. This should be good, since I’ve been channeled to like maths. However the actual maths in this subject isn’t much more involved than probability.
2. Algorithmic Problem Solving – This is subject were we write code in Pascal. It looks like this will be good, even though Pascal is not quite as useful as something like C++ (however it’s a good language for learning programming concepts). In this subject we don’t have an exam (YAY!), instead we have to submit a programming portfolio (OHSHI-!). It’s going to be difficult to choose something to code for this. However it might be fun, considering there’s a really nice gaming API developed by the uni (called SwinGame), which makes it easy to make 2D games.
3. Enterprise Technologies and Architectures – This looks like it might be an okay subject. Business-related stuff isn’t quite my cup of tea, however the lecturer seems to be interesting (he refactored Cadbury’s chocolate manufacturing processes once). There’s an oral presentation in this subject though, which will not be good.
4. Database Analysis and Design – This is going to be quite a good subject, mainly because a lot of it is stuff like SQL which I’m already familiar with. In other words, it looks kinda easy which is good.

Overall it looks like it will be an interesting first semester. I’m quite looking forward to getting my coding portfolio underway, as I’m most likely going to code up some fun games. However it will be a while before I have anything good, as I’ve still got to learn Pascal. While we did do Borland Delphi in Information Systems in Year 11, we had a truly incompetent teacher, so we didn’t really learn anything. Therefore I’ve got to learn everything again.

Anyhow, the second week starts .. uh … next week … so that should be good.

–Ben

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 2nd, 2008 at 12:38 am 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.