Computer Science Degree

Computer Science helps you to learn the principles of how computers and the languages that run on them are designed, and how to write good and well-structured programs. There will be many areas covered in a computer science degree all of them making graduates highly employable.

Computer Security
Computer Science degrees will give you an introduction onto one of the most rapidly expanding areas of modern computer science – computer security. Computer Security is on the pulse of any computer programmer these days and with the continuing expansion of IT, it is an area that is constantly evolving. For example, the development of national and international medical databases of patient information which will provide many advantages to doctor and patient will have huge security issues with patients privacy being of utmost importance., but there are vital privacy issues.

Parallel Computers
Parallel supercomputers have been available for many years, but have been used mainly in niche applications such as weather forecasting.  The wider use of parallel computing has been unnecessary because of "Moore's Law", i.e. the capacity of computers roughly doubles every 18 months.  In most applications, if computers were not fast enough, all one had to do was wait a while!  In the last few years, however, the clock speeds of microprocessors have remained relatively constant.  You will probably have seen television advertisements for processors with multiple (e.g. Duo) processing cores: this is the main direction in which microprocessors are now becoming more powerful. For good performance all applications will have to use parallel computing - often on a single chip.   Using this effectively creates a whole new challenge for the industry - and will need people well trained in how to exploit this technology. 

Computer Science Degrees Practical Based Work
Computer science degrees that are quality programmes should give you as much exposure to practical based work as possible. This should include writing your own programs in connection with taught courses.  They will also allow you to undertake a project, in which you will usually work on some larger piece of programming or analysis over several months and write up a dissertation on it.

 A good Computer Science Degree will prepare you for the cutting edge of technology as well as training you in the principles that are certain to underlie future technologies just as they underlie today's.  It will train you to think, solve problems methodically, and to do a large piece of work and present it well.  For these last reasons many people find that computer science is also an ideal general numerate degree for those wanting to go into financial, management consulting and similar areas.

For more information contact:
British Computer Society www.bcs.org.uk

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