I am not an ICS student but I do agree that the department should offer more resources for students. For example, hosting the classes in classrooms with computer access. I understand it is just more practical for students to have their own laptops but money is an issue for most students. This is my first ICS class and I had to get a new laptop because the one I was using was not up to specifications. In the engineering department, having a laptop is not a requirement even for computer engineering students.
I also agree that there should be more courses offered, in different concentrations. There should be more courses for computer engineering students, since the EE department doesn't offer all of them.
I'm not sure if ICS courses have lab times, but if not, they should. The programming courses I've taken in the EE department had labs and I feel the scheduled 3 hour time slot is a great way of giving the students time to collaborate and work on projects face-to-face.
1) It can be stressful. You must be willing to spend a lot of time on problems, homework, and projects.
2) Class Availability and prerequisites. You need to really plan out what classes you need to take for the semester.
3) Depending on the class and who is teaching it, you may have to learn the material on your own.
1) Specifically at UH Manoa, the program is not ABET accredited so that may hurt us when trying to find a job later
2) Classes are generally pretty hard so it is hard to maintain a good GPA, even Gerald told me so when I switched to computer science
3) There is no real way to obtain the oral communications/ethics requirements in the ICS field alone. The only one available is ICS 390, which is the TA class which requires an instructor's approval, which also doesn't count as an ICS class in the STAR degree requirement to graduate.
1) Registration is fairly difficult due to the shortage of sections for some classes.
2) The learning curve to programming can be steep and daunting and getting personalized time can be challenging in classes with a fairly large amount of students.
3) The ethics and oral credits needed for the major are hard to get due to the very limited number of courses that offer these credits.
1. There's a lot of work, it's hard to gauge how long a project will take, and code doesn't necessarily get better when you put more time into it.
2. The schedule and workload is isolating, both from non-tech people who don't understand what we do, and other techs who are differently specialized.
3. Many of us are irritating and pretentious, as well as sexist. There are stereotypes to cut through at every turn both from outside and inside the field.
3 ways the ICS program could improve.
1. Have more defined branches of study. Computer science is such a broad topic that you end up taking a lot of classes on different topics. It could be more effective if you define certain branches to take, then all of the classes in that branch will relate to a specific area of computer science instead of taking some classes that have little impact on your future career area.
2. The course load is quite heavy, as an average student I find it hard to take difficult classes that are outside of the ICS courses that I currently take. It makes it hard to balance a schedule when you get to the higher up classes.
3. More inter-major events, if that makes sense. I feel like most of the events where we get to interact and work with other students are limited to Business and Engineering. It would be cool to have an event that got together with some of the other majors on campus and see how we can help eachother.
1. Classes get filled up very fast and are only offered during certain semesters. There should be more chances for students to take these classes.
2. Some professors can be hard to understand sometimes and have less interaction with students due to lecture format. Maybe there can be designated days for questions and answers/ review.
3. Sometimes it is unclear why certain courses are required for certain degrees.
Three bad things about being an ICS student:
1. Time consuming. Most of the assignments and projects (maybe all of them) consumes a lot of time from my study and personal life. This is the issue most of the time especially when debugging codes. Things are even worse if the class(es) has to finish a bunch of programs in a short period of time.
2. Certain courses do not offer a lot of sections. I transferred to UHM last semester and most of the ICS classes that I had to take were all filled up on the very first day of registration. I do understand that the system prioritizes the graduating students, but the university should offer more sections of these courses especially when they only offer the class once a year.
3. Improve focus of study. ICS is a very broad major and it has too many branches. It should be better if the university can narrow down all the possible branches and let the students take whatever they only need to take. This way, students will be able to save money, time, and effort.
1. Can sometimes be confusing.
2. Probably takes more time than we would like.
3. Have to think like a computer to figure out how to make things work
1. The class times. The ICS courses have a wide range of times that it makes finding an elective to fit a problem.
2. The long nights or in other words, debugging. One of the most time consuming things about being an ICS student is one typo that can make mess up the entire program, only for you to find it hours later.
3. Not enough specialized courses. There is so much you can do with programming but looking at the courses provided we only go over so much, and if you want to specialize in one, it is only offered in one or two courses.
I am a computer engineering student so my experiences within the ICS department are limited so I will elaborate on my experiences in CENG with a focus on the ICS aspect.
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