Make your own opportunities

Joining university is a hard and a life changing decision. The course you want to study, the university and if further study is right for you. The likelihood is that going to university is the first major opportunity you’ll encounter. It’s a major stepping stone towards a career, but getting accepted to the university is the first hurdle.

The definition of luck is that it’s brought on by chance rather than one’s own action, but opportunities on the other hand can be brought on by things like skill, determination and contacts. Doing things like researching into a programming language for a programming course before going into the university interview or maybe playing around in some 3D software when joining a 3D Animation interview means a lot. The interviewee may have someone who’s done exactly that, meaning if you haven’t dabbled and researched you might find yourself looking elsewhere. Every small thing counts, printing Hello World maybe slight, but at least you've taken the time to look into it in your own time. The more effort you put in, the results will clearly show and will give you a much wider range of options in life’s next step. This is my last blog post, I've successfully finished university with a first and achieved everything I wanted to. I thought I’d round up with something that I wish I was told when I was younger. Make your own opportunities can be something as simple as joining a user group, every single contact you create is vital for when you finish university. It’s very long term, but every little bit extra you do will help in the long run. My final year of university I did an internship, Microsoft Student Partnership, freelanced, co-authored a paper and planned it all around my study time. These have all led to other opportunities and such as guest blog post sites on some major websites all because of the blog you’re reading now!  

Extra classes, events and user groups at university

Now there is plenty of societies and groups that the university hold. Event workshops for CV’s, languages lessons and I think I’ve even seen gaming societies. I’ve attend very interesting guest lectures which aren’t apart of the curriculum but generally everyone attends. It gives you a better insight on how companies work and what to expect when going into industry. We’ve had quite a few of these guest lectures and I’m certain they have them for all aspects in computer science.

I’m attending another gamesJam/hackathon at Cambridge University next week (first weekend of July). Although this isn’t held by the University of Bedfordshire, a team of Bedfordshire students are going up and participating it. In computer science there are more technical user groups dotted all around. For example, there’s specific software user groups, operating system user groups and just general monthly/weekly tech events. Now it’s very difficult to compete with events which are held by in most cases experts or even creators of that software. It’s a place where people go to share ideas, contacts and get expert/peer advice.  

What’s amazing about being a Computer Science student at the moment is there is so much free knowledge and really plenty of events which relate to what you prefer. You may argue that you don’t need to be at university to attend these yes, but it’s amazing to have experts in the field very local/ most probably London.  From the ones I’ve attended everyone is very friendly and probably can answer any burning questions you have. Though I wouldn’t personally ask trivial questions which you can just research yourself and maybe not ask university assignment question answers. Rather techniques/tips to learn more on a specific area. Generally at these user groups there’s presentations that take places for some free extra knowledge!

Below are some links that you may find useful, studying at the University of Bedfordshire it’s a very quick journey to London. So there’s really no excuse to be attending these what mostly are free events. In some cases there’s a digital live steam you can watch if you can’t attend in person. 

Useful related links

List of societies running at Luton Campus

http://www.bedssu.co.uk/main-menu/societies/bedsocs-luton

Search for Microsoft related user groups

www.technicalcommunity.com

Search for Apple related user groups

http://appleusergroupresources.com/find-a-group/

UK Linux User groups 

https://lug.org.uk/

 

Autodesk events, workshops and seminars

http://uk.gep.autodesk-services.com/

Final year project/dissertation

I’ve successfully handed in my final year project/dissertation; I would have loved to read a blog about what is involved in creating an artefact/paper. I won’t be talking about the paper itself, more about the workload and how much time it takes.

I have 4 units each year, for us we only had 150/400% grades for the final year project (dissertation, viva, poster day and artefact itself). This meant that while I was doing the final year project I had exams and other assignments to be doing. Comparing to other universities that do the same course, it’s also sometimes 100% focus on 1 artefact in the final year. This makes it much more impressive for the portfolio as you have more time spent on it, but on the other hand there is a lot more pressure to pick the right topic.

That being said, even though it was less than half of the years mark, I would not under estimate the workload that is involved. I was very confident in the software and actually producing the artefact, but when it came to writing the dissertation I was basically on everyone else’s level.  My final paper was overall around 90 pages. It’s very daunting to think that you need to write that amount and keep good quality throughout the report. It’s not something you can do last minute. Generally when it came to assignments I did like to leave it late, but for this there is paper I had to make sure I was on schedule throughout the project. I was still working on it the day before it was due in, but only trivial. I’d say about 80% of people I knew where only starting the main thesis days/less than a week before it was due. I started months before but slowly started adding stuff as I went along. I would strongly recommend that you keep a personal blog post on your final year project. A few reasons for this:

•           It’s a perfect place to keep backups, access them wherever you are.
•           Good for informal notes and errors you encounter.
•           Easier to keep in contact with your supervisor, it’s an easy place to showcase your work.
•           Keeping a personal blog is fun in general; I’ve had a lot of success with my own with plenty of career opportunities out of it.

I personally had backups of my work on multiple cloud storage spaces, multiple hard drives and constant backups being made after every change in the project. I handed my final year project in last week.  

http://it-ca.net/blogsean/?page_id=1244

My final artefact can be found here, I may release my final year report too, depending on results.