quote:Original post by OB1st I think you guies need to be realistic. Do you expect to produce an industry standard game as soon as you graduate?
What exactly is your point here? I don''t think that graduates expect to be able to produce an industry standard game as soon as they graduate. Unfortunately, employers like to see you are already of a high quality when you apply for jobs... in other words, displaying skills that you can''t easily get from universities that refuse to teach anything relevant to the gaming industry. (Although they will happily teach things relevant to the web programming industry, for example.)
quote:Original post by tuita Just wondering how helpful UK/US university grads found their Computer Science / Information Technology etc. etc. degrees.
Asking because I have almost completed my studies in Australia, but honestly feel that I learn more outside of university through self-study projects, than I have inside. I feel that all I will gain from uni is a piece of paper that says "Yes, he is qualified".
I guess what I''m wondering is, do people outside of Australia feel that their courses were trully beneficial to their education, or just something they had to do to get a job.
This is generally how I feel about all the CS classes that I took. The math classes (majored in math too, as not to make it a complete wasted of time) were far more useful - I enjoyed my philosophy & ethics classes. The more academic CS classes, that could have been useful were made virtual worthless by "my peers" in the class. And my "Computer Architecture" class, which was one I was very interested in, was taught by a ditz and was a complete waste of time. I just read the book in the back of class. It was all extremely disappointing, because the school I went to is supposedly a great engineering school.
And, unfortunately, the degree hardly means "he''s qualified" because the industry knows that the degrees includes little directly applicable knowledge.
- The trade-off between price and quality does not exist in Japan. Rather, the idea that high quality brings on cost reduction is widely accepted.-- Tajima & Matsubara
Well, I for one think that a Computer Science degree is more useful in the sense that it teaches you the theory, rather than the implementation. For example, what is more useful? Knowing what a linked list is, how it works, how it compares to an array and other linear data structure OR knowing how to implement a linked list in Java, and then getting your first job where you need to write a linked list in C++, but can''t figure out how to do it because you learned the syntax instead of the theory?
I don''t think a university should really teach specific APIs (at least as part of a university degree). With some effort, if you understand what the API is doing, you can easily figure out which functions need to be called, etc. However, if you instead focus on practical things, your understanding is often limited to that narrow scope which hinders your general understanding of a subject. That way, in twenty years, when C++ is no longer the programming language used for games, you''ll be able to pick up the new language more quickly because both languages embody the same concepts.
My computer science degree from Brunel in the UK served as an excellent base to continue studying after completion of my degree. Even though I focussed on AI and discrete maths, it was easy to turn these around to getting to grips with game development.
The problem I have now with the current computer science degrees (mine is three years old now) is that they are looking more like IT related degrees focusing on things like web design and the business side of computing.
