The story up till now!
So it’s been a whole year since I started to study Computer Science here at UCL and where I once thought there would be plenty of time for me to get stuck into the subject, now a year down the line, I’m starting to think there isn’t actually enough for me to learn all the different things that are out there. However that said, in this short space of time I have been able to get into a lot of new things one way or another and life outside of work has been really interesting too.
So why did I even choose to study this subject in the first place? I suppose it’s a question that can be hard for some people to answer, the question of what do you want to do at university? What do you want to do for a job? Those sorts of thoughts were something that felt really far away to me, something that I would really only get a better idea of later, not now. There are two subjects I’ve always really enjoyed, economics and computer science, although the way it works out, I could only choose one. Now, I’ve always thought that whatever I would go on to do, I wanted to get involved in something that would help me make a difference in people’s lives. I guess it’s something that a lot of people want to do and for me it is the same, it’s the sort of thing that helps me see things through since at the end of the day it’s why I ultimately decided to study CS. It’s a subject that I think has a lot of scope and I’m not constrained to just one field, but instead I can apply it across whatever areas interest me- that’s the best thing about it, the choice that comes with it. It’s the kind of subject where I can take all the ideas in my head and make them come to fruition and in the end, whether it was the right choice or not, I guess we are soon to find out.
A couple things I am asked very often now that I am here at UCL are, how hard is university compared to school and do you like how things are now or before? I’d like to start off with the fact that university is much, much more work that school was, people told me A levels were harder than the first year of university. I laugh at that so much. The work I have done this year has been much more difficult that what I had done previously and a lot of this was down to the wider reading, the deadlines, the group work and the many endless nights where you stay up with your coffee wondering what time the sun is going to come up. You will not be working purely within what you are timetabled to learn, but like any good student it’s always important to find out new things yourself. Despite this though, the work which we did was so much more varied and since it was in a subject I enjoyed, so much more interesting to really get stuck into. So while yes it was harder and a lot of work, it was certainly work that was worth giving the time to and work that let me do something different to all the usual same rote-learning that A- levels felt like.
However, the first year has also been so much more than just that, there are loads of societies to go and explore, somewhere perhaps to try things a little out of your comfort zone. At UCL there is a wonderful tech society with ties in with CS and the number of events they run are phenomenal and a lot of my first year was actually made really, really fun thanks to the guys in the society and just being able to get involved with many of the events. I enjoyed it so much that next year my role there will be helping them to run hackathons and anything else we decide to run. If this year was fun, then next year is going to be even better.
Another thing that is really different is just how many people I have been able to meet, whether it be in halls, in lectures, in societies or just around campus. The thing is, at school our class sizes were tiny, we never had more than 10 people in a class and overall there were roughly 150 people in the year and you interacted with a fraction of these people usually. Here at university, there are so many people and it’s really interesting to get to know them and what makes UCL even better is how so many people come from all around the world! I’ve been really lucky to make some wonderful friends in my short time here, with whom I’ve had some of my best moments here and am looking forwards to having an even better 2nd year with them!
Over the coming year, the idea of this blog is to post some of the sorts of things we get up to during university like the projects and the kind of work we do, but even some of the other exciting things we get up to like the events we have lined up and just experiencing university life in London!
Stay tuned!
SachchitP.
