Hey Ben,

Glad to hear you’re looking forward to semester 2. I’m one of the 3rd-years who are off in magical IBL-land, so it’s good to hear about what’s going on back on campus PSD-wise.

I found this semester an interesting one, as the subjects have (or had, when I took them) different work flows, requiring more effort at different parts of the semester.

Usability has (IIRC) a fair amount of assessment early on in the semester, so watch for that. OOP needs work early, and will crunch you at the end if you want an HD (as you may have guessed, this holds true for pretty much every Andrew Cain subject
IT should be a breeze, esp. if you’ve worked with those languages before. The concepts are what you’ll get out of that subject, mainly.

CS is the sleeper in the bunch – watch it closely, ask questions if you don’t understand. The material isn’t necessarily hard, but it wasn’t (when I did it, at least) presented very clearly or coherently.

I’d rank them thusly:

Time required:
OOP
Usability (early, then peters)
CS (focus more when Usability slows down)
IT

Conceptual difficulty / potential “new stuff”:
OOP
CS
Usability
IT