A Day In The Life Of A King's College CompSci #82 (ADITLOAKCCS)

As Salamu Alaykum Wa Rahmatullahi Wa Barakatuh World!

9-11am Internet Systems lecture
Unlike last year, where I always cruised through lectures and crammed before exams, I decided to do myself a favour and make my notes during lectures. The only problem with that is, as I swiftly learnt last year, that sometimes the content covered in the lectures can be completely useless.

Essentially, you end up making a large amount of well written (or typed in my case) notes only to find out near the end of the semester that the exam only goes over about a quarter of your notes. That’s the problem with university. The lectures just stretch out what little content they have so that it lasts the full year for it to be worth £9000+.

In actuality, one could complete a standard 3 year degree in a single year. Even today’s lecture ended half an hour early like last week. And to think that this is going to probably continue for the rest of the semester is unbearable

11am-12pm Internet Systems large group tutorial
The tutorials for this module seem so pointless I don’t know where to begin. There were 4 questions on the tutorial sheet, the answer for which were literally slides in the lecture itself. Considering the exam is going to be multiple choice, I seriously doubt we need to be able memorise reams and reams of material which is quintessentially waffle.

12-1pm Foundations of Computing 2 small group tutorial
This was the only useful session of the day. So far, this module is pretty easy but I doubt it’ll stay that way for long. Also on a side note, be prepared to have multiple consecutive sessions without any breaks. Mondays are a real mission from 9am to 1pm but looking on the bright side, the scheduled SEG discussion from 5-6pm turned out to be optional so at least I can go home straight away instead of waiting 4 hours.

Hope this helps!

A Day In The Life Of A King's College CompSci #81 (ADITLOAKCCS)

As Salamu Alaykum Wa Rahmatullahi Wa Barakatuh World!

11am-1pm Software Engineering Group Project lecture
This lecture made me realise one big difference between this year and last year; the amount of coursework. Last year, coursework for all the modules were pretty minimal apart from PPA. This year on the other hand, PEP (Practical Experiences In Programming) and SEG (Software Engineering Group Project) are very coursework heavy modules so you have to work continuously throughout the semester.

Gone are the days were you could come home everyday and “chill”. Procrastination is futile for the inevitable will bound to make you stressed enough to just get on with it. I mean, it’s only the first week back from the long summer and we’ve already been assigned a ton of coursework.

Contrastingly, FC2 (Foundations of Computing 2) and INS (Internet Systems) have very little coursework so one can afford to cram more towards the end of the semester. Anyway, I’m going to get really busy soon so It’ll be a challenge keeping this up too…

Hope this helps!

A Day In The Life Of A King's College CompSci #80 (ADITLOAKCCS)

As Salamu Alaykum Wa Rahmatullahi Wa Barakatuh World!

12-2pm Foundations of Computing 2 lecture

As the module name suggests, this is a follow up or sequel if you will, to last year’s Foundations of Computing (FC1) module. It started off pretty basic since it picked up exactly where FC1 ended; Turing machines.

Now that I think about it, most of the lecture was a recap of the content covered in the previous module with some new stuff that seemed pretty standard as well. Still, as introduction lectures go it wasn’t the worst, it just could’ve been more interesting.

And that’s all I have to say about that.

Hope this helps!

A Day In The Life Of A King's College CompSci #79 (ADITLOAKCCS)

As Salamu Alaykum Wa Rahmatullahi Wa Barakatuh World!

9-11am Practical Experiences In Programming Practical
Today is the longest day in the introduction week but it felt shorter than it was. First off, it was raining cats and dogs in the morning to the extent that every man, woman and child had a gigantic black umbrella to shield them. I, on the other hand, braved it all with nothing and arrived to my practical soaking wet.

Anyway, the practicals for this module always occur before the lecture for some bizarre reason so today’s lab just consisted of some warm up Java exercises. The module itself teaches C++ and Scala but I guess they just wanted students to get back in the saddle nice and easy (especially if you were someone like me who didn’t do any programming over the summer).

Apart from that we also had to set up our Github repositories for the module’s coursework and do a plagiarism and collusion quiz just as a reminder of what’s acceptable behaviour whilst completing the coursework.

12-3pm Practical Experiences In Programming Lecture

After the morning’s lab followed a one-hour free period which in hindsight, could’ve been used more productively to do some coursework. However, since it’s only the first week back I think I’ll let it slide.

Unlike yesterday’s lecture which finished early, this lecture actually took an hour longer than timetabled. Lectures are normally 2 hours followed by an hour’s tutorial however, this lecture simply went on for the whole 3-hour session.

After the course overview, it went through the basics of C++ which looked pretty doable but I doubt it will be that easy once I actually start coding my coursework. In contrast to yesterday’s Internet history lecture, this was actually useful content that you need to know so there was something to keep my eyes open.

This module is actually 100% coursework so it’s a good idea to keep on top of your work as the semester progresses and say bye-bye to cramming and last minute revision.

3-4pm Year 2 Re-Introduction lecture

Last but definitely not least was the annual introduction lecture. At first it seemed like the were just regurgitating last year’s lecture about basic student and admin stuff but then it went on to talk about the Year in Industry (YIN) program which caught my interest.

I’m currently enrolled on the integrated masters course but after today’s lecture, I’m genuinely thinking of switching to the YIN course. After all, if you want to work in industry after graduation then this is the way forward.

Hope this helps!

A Day In The Life Of A King's College CompSci #78 (ADITLOAKCCS)

As Salamu Alaykum Wa Rahmatullahi Wa Barakatuh World!

This year I’m going to try to write my blogs in segments so it’ll be easier to actually do them since I’m busier than ever. So, without further ado let’s begin.

9-11am Internet Systems Lecture

I should’ve written this on the train home yesterday but I forgot to charge my laptop. Nevertheless, since it’s the beginning of the year and well, it only happened yesterday I can pretty much recall how mundane it was.

That’s the thing with introduction weeks. Most, if not all the lectures just contain filler with a few bits of info here and there telling you useful stuff like how the course is assessed etc. As the name suggests, Internet Systems is focused on one technology alone; the Internet. You know, HTML and HTTP and whatnot.

Anyway, when having a glance over the topics covered in the module I was fairly confident some of them were covered in A level Computer Science, albeit to a lesser degree. Regardless, the first lecture simply talked about the history of the Internet in all it’s glory which I cannot detail here since I lost focus in less than half an hour.

You’d think that on the first day of the year one would restrain from not paying attention for at least one lecture but alas, the task was too great (probably because of the 9am start). Thankfully, that was the only session of the day so after a very long 2 hours I was free to return to my humble abode.

Now that I think about it the lecture actually ended 20 minutes early, further proving that it was all filler that the lecturer couldn’t even stretch to the whole 2 hours. That’s all for today, hopefully this year I’ll be doing these more regularly InShaAllah.

Hope this helps!