So my uni results to-date are finally up on my website.
Most of them are reasonable. Ironically enough, I always seem to score higher in electronics subjects than computer science, despite being much stronger the other way around. Some of that is because I focus far more on electronics subjects in general, knowing I don’t have as much experience with them. But part, I might suggest, is because in many of the computer science subjects I’ve known a lot about the subject material before evening starting, and might have different opinions to the markers.
The big stand-out of course is my thesis mark, which isn’t too flattering. But then, it’s reasonably fair on the final result, which wasn’t anything to write home about. There are lots of reasons why things didn’t go so well there, the mains one being that I didn’t really care for the topic or work I was doing, and I only had a few months in which to do it – the uni seems to expect all thesis students to be psychic and have almost completed their lit reviews before they even start the subject.
Even once I did have the topic “nailed down”, I really had no idea what I was meant to be doing. The uni puts you in a really stupid position – you have to choose one of their predefined topics… in theory you can make up your own, but you need to find someone who’s willing to take that on, which is a rare occurrence. In my case, it was even less likely because there was only one supervisor with similar interests to me. I can’t recall exactly why I didn’t end up working with them – odds are I simply couldn’t get in contact with them in time. Of the four supervisors I contacted at the start of the year, only two ever got back to me, and it still took two weeks.
So they give you some almost random topic, which they define typically in a single short paragraph. You then have to figure out what the heck you’re meant to do with that. But you need to do what they want, if you want to score highly. Only, they won’t tell you what they want. Because you should know, of course.
Anyway, I’ll kill this rant here before it explodes. :)
For now, I’m trying to figure out what needs to be done to make sure I graduate at the end of this year. Aside from really not wanting to extend my academia any further, until I graduate I don’t think I can obtain a work visa for the U.S. Which would be an option I’d like to have, obviously.
So it seems I’m short two subjects or so. One is needed to make up for DIS. Either I obtain the necessary credit for that subject, or I’ll have to take up another one. But I already have quite a course load as-is.
I guess I’ll just have to wait until I’m back in Australia so I can hunt down the appropriate administrata and beat them around a bit.
