I finished this course and I still regret it.
I was kinda pushed to do this course by my mum (I should’ve just done an OpenPolytechnic one! Sigh!). I really don’t want to study, and I think it’s pretty pointless in the IT industry - even though I think not having a degree probably does hurt your prospects with some employers. I certainly had an employer who kept harping about how someone was qualified to do their job, which my kiwi instincts are telling me that it’s a hint I wasn’t good enough.
Anyway, onto this course. Let me state this, I have no issues with the course, the lecturers or anything, I just felt like it was pointless for me to study it. I did however, learn a surprisingly amount of stuff.
What the course is
The one I did was this one: Postgraduate Certificate in Information Technology, at the University of Auckland (UoA). It’s essentially two papers, which you can do in one semester in-person, or across two semesters remotely. You study two papers:
- COMPSCI 718 Programming for Industry
- COMPSCI 719 Programming with Web Technologies
It’s for people who want to break into the IT industry or are already in it, who have previously studied something unrelated (I studied international business & food science). It’s supposed to help you break into the industry, and easily let you transition into a Masters if you want to do so in the future.
COMPSCI 718
This is a paper that focuses on object-oriented programming (OOP). It covers basic programming concepts (types, loops, recursion etc) and multiple OOP key principles such as encapsulation, inheritance, polymorphism and composition. The programming language, quizzes and assignments are in Java, which I hadn’t really worked with in the past but have seen a good amount (Clean Code anyone?).
There were a few quizzes with lots of extended due dates haha, and a few other assignments to complete. The main projects were two games, one to be played in the terminal while the other as a desktop app. They were both pretty fun to complete. I couldn’t figure out this bug with the last game project, but I gave up on it and it still got a good mark.
Lots of reflections to write with each assignment / project. The final project also requires you to write a long report. Writing reflections is rather easy to me (otherwise I wouldn’t have so many blog posts with so many posts!) so I think I spent more time wondering if I was being too wordy and cutting half of it down.
COMPSCI 719
This is a paper that focuses on web technologies, so totally my expertise (web development). It covers basic HTML, CSS and Javascript on the frontend, and key relational database concepts and design techniques. The main frontevend framework is Svelte, with a Nodejs backend.
This one also has a few quizzes…and way easier than COMPSCI 718. Way less questions for sure. A few assignments, which I think I overengineered entirely. I’ll see if I can share that work on this website. I was also apparently the top student for this course, I guess the markers did like my overengineering quite a bit.
The main assignment is a group project. I do like working in teams but…eugh, not this one. Why are working adults still so bad with group projects?? But to be fair, I think I also had way higher expectations for that assignment (design T_T code quality T_T basic UX T_T HELP) and hence was way too overbearing about it. I wasn’t super satisfied with that project but I also did way too much work as is. That project won’t be shown here (noped so quick out of the team chat and forgot to ask for permission).
That group project also requires a long report. I was penalised for writing long-ish paragraphs. Classic wordy me.
What I learned
I guess you could say I got to dabble with Java and Svelte, two technologies I’ve never used professionally. Many basic programming language and framework concepts are pretty similar across the other ones, so I really just had to figure out the specific nuiances.
If anything, I did appreciate that I’d learned a bit more about actual programming concepts, especially the ones covered in COMPSCI 718. I knew fairly well about concepts like inheritance and composition, and vaguely understood other design patterns such as state, observer and template method. You could say I kind of knew them, and had often used them in practice, but hadn’t really linked it to a theory until now.
Why I regret it
It was a good course, and I definitely learned way more than I was expecting. I didn’t really put much effort into it either. But, it just…felt like a waste of time and money to me, and so far has not led to more work. This extra piece of paper has just simply given me no advantage (so far) against the huge saturation of more qualified and experienced IT professionals out there.
It is what it is. Tough times.
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