h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

So, that's over half of the universities visited so far: Aberystwyth, Keele and Swansea. I'm applying for Computer Science with German.

University of Wales, Aberystwyth (UWA) (Fri 21 Feb)

The day started off with a video about the "team-building" exercises all their freshers are sent on. Apparently it's a very effective way of teaching teamwork skills, which are very important in software engineering - the days of the lone coder are long past.

They only showed us Windoze machines, but they assured me there were Linux boxes too... before comforting me with a few Welsh cakes with jam and clotted cream There was an informal one-on-one chat (not an interview, as the offer had already been made) in which a lecturer claimed that there were "armies" of dyslexics in their CS department! Well, at least I won't have any trouble getting Learning Support.

While the chats were going on, we were put in a room full of Windoze machines with the Java SDK installed (on them or a server, one or the other). We had an example program, which was sort of a Logo-type thing, set up to draw a hollow 'L' shape in a window using a turtle, presumably as an example of what they would be teaching in the first year. I tried to modify it to draw a hollow 'P' shape instead, but there was no "penUp()" method. I spent half an hour trying to implement one, but the program's design made it rather hard. It was good fun nonetheless.

At some point (before the talks) we were taken on an accommodation tour - a few different halls, just to give a taste of the variety available. One of the halls was very big, about three dozen rooms to a floor, with a few kitchens and bathrooms. The others were pretty much par for the course. All of them had Ethernet sockets - a pig plus for a CS student.

Keele University, nr. Newcastle-under-Lyme (Sat 22 Feb)

Stayed near Stone overnight at the B&B where there used to be a farm owned by the people who established Keele Uni... just a meaningless coincidence.

I wasn't impressed by Keele at all. Their visit day was fairly freeform: four talks, for which we were issued tickets, on student life, finances, degree structure, and studying abroad. Lots of useful info, but nothing academic.

We got an accommodation tour here too. Nothing special, again. Some of the students recommended NOT having an ensuite bathroom since you get to know your hallmates better that way. Well, it was something like 2:30 and I still hadn't heard anything about the courses.

Finally we decided to do the academic thing and visit the CS and German departments. What an anticlimax. The staff seemed completely unenthusiastic. The German guy just talked at us four half an hour, after showing us a German-language history TV programme (which itself was actually quite interesting). The CS people were even worse. They had a little table in front of one of their labs (not even *in* it!), with a very small display about some postgrad's distributed-computing research project. Not a running computer in sight! It was like a school's open day, not one of a quality institution of higher education pushing to increase its intake.

Oh, and there was no food

University of Wales, Swansea (UWS) (Wed 26 Feb)

Very convenient location, just up the A34 and along the M4, and follow the coast... or direct by rail, with no changes. UWA would have been about as convenient by rail, were it not for Dr Beeching

We left home at 8:50 am, and arrived about 12:50 pm - 35 mins late. The first talk was about computer graphics research, apparently designed to be interesting but unimportant, so that latecomers wouldn't miss anything. We arrived just as the second talk (about the department and the course) was starting

Lunch followed - a delicious finger buffet. Probably the first I've ever been to where there were NO sausage rolls! A good thing, as they would have spoiled the chicken and mayo sandwiches, ham and cheese baguettes, samosas, spring rolls, onion bhajis, mini pizzas etc.

At the table with us was a third year student wearing a T-shirt: "iMachiavellian. Think dissident." Strange, I thought it was Billg who was Machiavellian And someone else had: "There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don't." Evidently a healthy culture here.

Next, yet another talk... about IT Network Wales, an organisation that tries to combat the brain drain of Welsh IT folks to England. They were running out of time so they had to rush the talk, meaning I don't remember much else about it.

At last, they took us on a campus tour, in several groups. The various buildings had about the same look: painted concrete. Not too attractive, but functional. We went up to the media centre (where they run the university radio station) and met a man who kept saying "Clearing is wonderful. Clearing is how you have a life after f**king up your A-levels. Oops, have I got the right group?"

There was a café, which was choking in cigarette smoke, and a bar, which wasn't. Being a non-smoker I was put off the café somewhat. (Why do students smoke? It's a stupid waste of money. 20 fags a day costs almost a grand a year.) The bar was good though. A pint there reportedly costs just £1 during happy hour No real though

The halls were... basic. The room we were shown was empty, but being on the end of the hall, and having an ensuite bathroom, it had very little space. The desk was only about half a metre deep. My monitor (a 19" CRT) would take up its whole depth, with no room for the keyboard One of the guides said he'd bought a thin screen monitor halfway though the course for that reason. There were also no network sockets, though the student with the iMachiavellian T-shirt said that a campus-wide IEEE 802.11b network (aka Wi-Fi, wireless LAN) was being worked on and should be available by September (unfortunately such adapters are rather expensive - £45 for the cheapest at Novatech). And the kitchen, bizarrely, had no oven. I think they just picked a bad hall to show us... well, the others were off campus. They say there's another hall being built on campus... maybe I'll try to get a place there.

The departmental tour was much more uplifting. They have some slightly odd hardware. CRTs were being phased out in favour of thin-screen monitors because they can be made bigger without sacrificing desk space There was a room full of what seemed to be thin clients, until I noticed they were running Windoze. They were HP boxes, apparently designed to be disposable (if it fails, don't fix it, just throw it away). There was another room with a few G4 Macs for those that prefer them, and some cubical machines - not Qubes, but x86 Linux boxes. Very nice-looking cases.

During the tour I asked a few questions regarding their syllabus. They have AI, but only in the last year, and modules in logical and functional programming (Prolog and Haskell, respectively). The course takes a long-term approach - teaching programming in the first year, using Delphi, then moving on to "more industrially significant languages" such as Java and C. The idea is to teach you concepts that are common to all languages so you can learn new ones yourself, rather than getting stunted by learning languages that are on the way out, like VB Looks to me like a very good way to do a CS degree course.

After that, there was a talk about accommodation, but I was dragged off to the German department (since they hadn't noticed I was doing German too). They have a similarly flexible approach; whereas much of the course (especially in the first year) concentrates on language, there are several optional modules on German history, politics, literature etc. There's also a computer science language module, which seems to suggest that this course is exactly what I was looking for

The third year is spend abroad. All the courses I applied for have this in common. I want to become fluent in German, so this is essential. There's a choice of studying in a German uni, teaching English (as an assistant) in a German school, or working for pay. I'll probably take the last.

Summary: So far, UWS is top academically; UWA is better for accommodation, and I like the city more. I still have Aston (Birmingham) to visit, and I haven't heard from Oxford Brookes yet.

TTFN, and watch this space for further reports.

}:=8

Yum.

The Welsh ones sound pretty good to me too. The equipment is more up-to-date than at Manchester, but then you know with Linux it's not how good your equipment is but how up-to-date it is (in the case of Manchester, not very ).

The Swansea prospectus sounds better than the others, but I can't help but think Manchester's is more appropriate (or it was until they made it all Java-ey) ... Delphi! - we learned ML (predecessor of Haskell) in our first year and it was a great way to get started.

I know someone who did his undergrad at Aberystwyth and he said it was pretty good too.

~

Practically everybody seems to say Aber is a good uni to study at

One more thing... at Swansea they GIVE you a copy of SuSE 8.1

I thought that with Linux, you could use any hardware as long as you could get drivers for it... most bugs seem to have workarounds in the drivers.

What sort of hardware do they have at Manchester then?

And what's wrong with Delphi? Maybe it's not so good if you need console I/O, but at least (comparing to VB, C# etc - you REALLY wouldn't want to learn those as a first language) there's a Linux version (Kylix), and it's even GPL-licenced.

OTOH, perhaps you're right. The Kylix spiel says "traditional Linux tools like gcc and Emacs are difficult to learn and do not provide the degree of productivity demanded by corporate developers." The second part of this simply isn't true - UNIX tools are *designed* for high productivity - witness autoconf, automake, cvs, yacc (not that I've used any of them ). Maybe they're hard to learn - I don't know about Emacs, but I've found Vim lets me work MUCH faster than any IDE's editor.

Quick question about Java: can you use access specifiers in classes as labels like in C++? I mean, instead of specifying each member as public, private or protected, you write "private:" (etc) and define all following members as private by default.

}:=8

PS. Been running through a Scheme tutorial program - see http://www.wurb.com/if/game/128. It's great fun, if you like that sort of thing.

SuSE ... yuck! Linux is free anyway, but you should at least use a decent distro, not one that's built around non-GPL software.

Sorry, I meant linux works fine on any old hardware, as long as the software is up-to-date (me being ambiguous).

Delphi's based on nasty-nasty-nasty Pascal, isn't it? C is a nicer language than Pascal, and _that's_ saying something, considering how rubbish C is.

Vim is fast, aye. Emacs is great for those who can be bothered to learn it - it works on a built-in language called elisp (very mich like scheme and sawfish's librep), which has a hundred-something page manual and is a whole Christmas in itself (I must learn it one day)...
I don't use auto{conf,make} but I use make, cvs and that stuff all the time, as well as (f)lex/(b)yacc during my course.

To answer your java question, unfortunately the answer appears to be "no". Java is designed to be self-documenting with a very "only-one-way" syntax (it's like the anti-perl). You can use package visibility, which takes no modifier at all, for your methods (c++ calls them function members, iirc), as this is generally just fine, but you really do have to declare all your instance variables (data members) private if you want the "clean" style with get()/set() accesors.