Any help or advice re unis and computer science

[Radi04]

I didn't go to uni and I'm trying to navigate this with dd, she's going in 2024.

No idea how you choose from thousands of courses!

Are there people at college who can help with this stuff?

Does your DD do best with structure? From what you are telling us, my concern is that without it she could easily start to fall behind. On a university STEM course this quickly spirals. For this reason and at the risk of overgeneralising, I usually observe students with autism doing best on fairly structured programmes. In our School a number of them choose to check in with their Personal Tutors or the Student Support Officer every week or two, because as STEM programmes go ours are somewhat loosely structured.

My DS is first year CS so we looked at this in detail. What we found were most RG were at least AAB with some much higher and most wanted maths. Some were ABB with contextual or a couple were ABB anyway eg Cardiff. There is a lot of maths in my son's CS course and he got A at A level maths and it has stretched him. I think some unis do extra sessions for those who didn't do maths. Have you looked at software engineering too. The CS and SE do the same modules in year 1 at his uni and he is actually thinking of changing to SE from next year as less maths! We found the post '92 unis tended to be around 112 points (BBC) eg Nottingham Trent. Ultimately decide if you want city or campus, what part of the country and research from there. If you want specific details feel free to PM me.

Russel group unis aren’t everything. Students get fed a great deal of rubbish about ‘best’ universities. Relevant for some subjects, not all though.

The school/ college should have a careers service, your daughter ( and you) should be able to see an advisor to help navigate the process.
Is the school having a parents event for this? Many do. If not, there is some great info on UCAS aimed at parents.

To start though, your daughter can create a UCAS Hub - this will create little files where she can save her favourite courses. ( once an account is created, you can ‘favourite’ by clicking the little heart on the top right of the course page). It will also start to send info on open days too. You can create a hub too if you like- then delete it after. That way you can get to grips with the system.

I would absolutely do what a pp suggested, and go to your nearest uni open day, just to get a feel for how open days work.

Usually students know how far away they want to be from home- start there. The UCAS filter doesn’t work very well for distance.
Does your school have access to unifrog? The search tool is pretty good for that.

On the uni course page you will see modules/structure/course content. That will tell what the course is comprised of.

If she likes graphics, she may also be interested in Computing for creative digital/ Game development degrees. If you put ‘creative computing’ in the ucas search box, courses will come up.

It doesn’t matter if she has autism ( for employment). I know someone who just started a graduate role in a computing related role, and the vast majority of the team ( large team, big company) had some form of autism

Poetryandwine this is so very helpful. I could cry!

Yes to structure! I hadn't thought about that, she would definitely prefer more time in classes/lectures than having to study on her own.

We are going to spend some time in a couple of weeks really looking into it again and using the filters on the sites. I would be so grateful if you could help a bit more when we've narrowed it down a bit!

We don't want to go any further north than Manchester I think, as we are very far south!

Deuxgarcons thanks so much, I may well ask some more advice from you when we've narrowed it down. I don't think she knows quite what she wants to do but that's interesting about SE. She has been coding since she was quite young and enjoys that. Is that SE? I'm so ignorant!

I agree with @deuxgarcons Software Engineering is worth investigating and I hope I have made it clear that I don’t think you should worry at all about RG, post 92, etc.

I do think you want Schools or programmes with a good track record on employment. I also agree with @Dotcheck that broadly speaking STEM accommodates autism well, but stand by my statement that autistic students seem to do best with structure.

Thank you Dotcheck yes she does have unifrog, that seemed more helpful than the ucas site actually, although still so many courses to choose from!

I thought gaming type ones might be very popular and harder to gain employment in?

All very useful. We do have a uni near us so might see when they have an open day

As CS and IT are such male dominated subjects, it might also be worth looking at which universities have active Women in Tech groups for support. When only ~10% of students are women it's good to have a network to make you feel like you belong.

Lots of the universities with active Women in Tech groups take part in the BCS Lovelace Colloquium, so their website might be a good place to start looking.

I am signing off for now. I love @Poblano idea to check for supportive female networks! HESA has gender breakdown on UG enrolments, though it might be a nuisance to find.

Happy to help more later

I think most CS degree courses require A level maths.

Your DD may have to look at things like computer animation/CGI/special effects type degree courses or qualifications instead of pure CS.

nationalcareers.service.gov.uk/job-profiles/animator

One suggestion I would have would be Computer Science at the University of Sussex -

www.sussex.ac.uk/study/undergraduate/courses/computer-science-bsc

The typical offer is ABB-BBB and it does not require A-Level maths.

Also Royal Holloway offer a 4 year BSc including a placement year

www.royalholloway.ac.uk/studying-here/undergraduate/computer-science/computer-science/

Accept cs in lieu of maths at A level and have an award for increasing female participation. Compact campus uni.

OP, google name of your nearest Unis & "Widening Participation": these programmes (1-4 taster days on suitable courses) are run by most Unis for local kids whose parents didn't go to Uni or whose parents are on low income.

last year at DS offer days (for comp sci), about 30% of attenders were female & about 30% of attenders were not white. Definitely not the same demographic it used to be studying CS nowadays.

To help DS choose, I asked him to avoid London (expensive) & to look at places that were < 4 hours drive/train trip from our home. Then we narrowed down based on his expected UCAS tariff... and in your case you need to check if they require maths A-level.

Op just checking your daughter is in y12 and is 16/17 right?

Hi, again -

@JocelynBurnell has lots of good things to say in general. For that reason, if your DD is interested in CS definitely check out Sussex.

I was just looking at the Guardian League Table, which puts a lot of weight on the student experience. Somewhat to my surprise, Royal Holloway CS ranked highly at 30 (considering that Maths is not required). The campus is in Surrey and it is lovely. As the @LIZS says, they offer a placement year. The entry requirements seem a good fit for your DD.

But I think she def needs to investigate IT and probably SE also.

Would she be interested in a degree apprenticeship. There were quite a few available in IT/CS when my DS and his mates did theirs 5 years ago. Obviously they are very competitive but maybe worth exploring as an option?

Hi again, yes agree also look at degree apprenticeships. My friend's son who is ND is on one and is loving it. He was home schooled and spent a lot of time coding and was only interested in computers and is now with a very well known company on their DA scheme attached to a uni.

My DS called tonight and he said they do a lot of coding in C and Java and you say your DD loves coding so that should appeal to her for CS or SE.

@lljkk I'm quite surprised that 30% of attendees at offer days were female. I have recent experience of a CS department and around 10% of students in the department were female (eg 2 students out of 24 on the masters course), which I believe was on par with the national average at the time.

Attending offer holder days is not compulsory, though.So possibly some offer holders may be more likely than others to attend and the attendee demographic isn't necessarily totally representative of applicants / offer holders / starters (at its crudest, I'm a white male, it's a Computer Science course, therefore it's for me, no need to go, vs I'm neither of those things, this course / university interests me, but I need to know more about how both would be specifically for 'people like me')?

i feel like reminding you all that Kemi Badenoch's degree was CompSystEng & she started that course > 20 years ago. The world is indeed changing and has started changing already.

That one black woman studied for a particular degree whenever doesn't say anything about the the interest in / application or acceptance numbers / degree completion of the cohort in general, though.

I was merely pointing out that the observation that 30% of attendees at a non-compulsiory event had a particular characteristic and another poster's statement / belief that the proportion with that characteristics actually undertaking the degree course is rather less, are not mutually incompatible, the example I gave being just one possible reason.

In 1984, 37% of computer science graduates were female. This percentage declined to 18% of graduates in the period 1990-2010. By 2019, this has dropped to 13%.

While the overall number of students in the UK taking computing GCSEs in the UK is increasing, the number of girls taking the subject is falling:

www.computerweekly.com/news/252505254/Number-of-girls-taking-GCSE-computing-drops-in-2021

I'd put a word in for the De Montfort University Computer Science department, it's huge and if you apply for computer science it's easy to choose options to specialise in the areas that are most interesting to you. Changing between degrees with different titles in the faculty is not too hard at the end of the first year particularly when going from the general to the specific.

Doesn't require maths A Level.

DS came up with solid reasons why Offer Day attenders might have female over-representation.