My Third Year Course Units

The time of the year where I have to choose the course units for the upcoming academic year has come. For a MEng student in Computer Science, the third year is probably the most relevant in the four years period you are going to spend in Manchester. While the first year doesn’t affect your final grade at all, the second is worth 12.5%, which is still a bit irrelevant compared to the other 87.5%.

On the other hand, the third year is worth more than 50% of your final grade. The main focus is on the third year project, which is really close to what a dissertation is, but with a strong technical side, based on what you have built during the year. That’s why this project occupies 40 credits. The compulsory list of course units, apart from the third year project, includes two finance/management based units from the business school.

In this way, there are 60 credits of compulsory course units and 60 of optional units. As in the second year, I have chosen my optional units at the beginning of August with the aim to “try” to follow what I have liked in the past. That’s why I have opted for:

– COMP38120 – Documents, Services and Data on the Web, which is a two semesters course.
– COMP38411 – Cryptography and Network Security, a course without any coursework (Wooooop!)
– COMP37111 – Advanced Computer Graphics
– COMP37212 – Computer Vision
– COMP33512 – User Experience

These courses will enable me to complete the Graphics themes, which contains 3 course units, the distributed systems one and also Interactive Systems Design, which has one course unit, User Experience. My personal advice is not to choose a course units just because the name sounds “cool”. I have done that mistake in the past, it turns out that cool things are really hard! 😀