Three bad things about being an ICS student

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Rob Namahoe on August 30, 2013 at 8:27pm

 I think the UH ICS program could improve by:

1) Offering more courses via distance learning.  Recording lectures and making them available on YouTube or iTunes U could allow the department to offer a wider variety of courses and more frequently.

2) Offering more courses during the summer session; the offering this past summer was pretty limited.

3) Working with the community colleges to standardize the curriculum since many community college students will eventually transfer to UH.  I, for example, took Java I and Java II at two different community colleges and was expected to know things upon entering Java II that I hadn’t learned in Java I. I had a similar experience after transferring to UH and programing in our Algorithms class.

Permalink Reply by Grant Shimogawa on August 30, 2013 at 8:32pm

I would have appreciated more opportunities to work in groups with fellow ICS students.

I think I would have benefited from more practical projects earlier on in lower level classes rather than having only exercises as assignments.

There should be some coverage of the ergonomic of using a computer.

Permalink Reply by David Aghalarpour on August 30, 2013 at 8:34pm

While I do highly praise the overall quality of most of the ICS professors at the University of Hawaii, there are a number of professors here that speak poor English. That’s not to say that these certain professors aren’t intelligent – they most definitely are – but some of them clearly have difficulty communicating their thoughts and ideas at times. As a student, this can be very frustrating and can affect the overall learning experience.

I’ve always felt that there was a lack of clubs and groups within the UH ICS program. The only one I’m really aware of are the Grey Hats club, which delves into the field of computer security – and while that is most certainly an interesting field, it’s not for everyone. It would be very welcoming to see the formation of new clubs within the ICS program.

There aren’t really any “hangout” rooms for ICS students other than the graduate students meeting room, which, as the name implies, is only for graduate students. Having a room solely dedicated to undergrad ICS students would be a great way for new students to meet and build relationships with one another.

Permalink Reply by Justin Chee on August 31, 2013 at 1:00am

Three things that could use improvement:

1) Some classes have strange hours.  My ICS 332 class meets Thursdays from 6:00 to 8:15 pm.  That's pretty inconvenient.

2) I feel that many classes would benefit from labs.  I realize that we don't have the space to accommodate every class, but labs are an excellent way to learn, and get help on certain things.

3) Some classes aren't offered every semester.  So for some classes that are direct prerequisites of each other, a student may just miss registering for the first one, meaning that they'd have to wait another year to take that class, which would lead to the next one.

Permalink Reply by Andrew Pearson-Wood on September 1, 2013 at 8:42pm

1. Classes fill quickly and are often only offered once per year.

2. Classes after the initial introductory programming classes seem to have a bit of a steep learning curve.  From the limited experience I've had with 300 level courses, they have a mixture of students who are very far along in the Computer Science program, combined with students such as myself who are still fairly new and unfamiliar with advanced concepts.  It can be tough to keep up with the more experienced students.

3. Time consuming homework.

Permalink Reply by Daniel A on September 5, 2013 at 8:02am

I just saw my response and I hope some things have changed in the department.  Aloha Professor Johnson!

 

For students who think class hours are inconvenient imagine the inconvenience of being called at 1am because something doesn't work and you have to fix it. Or putting in the 70th hour of work because the section of code you are working on is holding up the project.  Men and women in charge don't care about what's convenient they care about results.  You don't want that death stare from the professor because your group couldn't hit its milestone.

 

Good luck and forget about sleep you can sleep after the semester is done.

Permalink Reply by Patrick Karjala on January 14, 2015 at 7:49pm

1.  Evening and night time classes are generally not offered for those who are working professionals.  Graduate enrollment in ICS classes would likely increase if night classes were offered, and it would be beneficial for those who are trying to further their studies while working.  Many of the other Graduate programs at UH Manoa already do classes from 5 PM onward.  If ICS is claiming to support a local tech industry, they need to offer those who are working in it the opportunity to get further education at a time that is convenient for them.

2.  Class availability appears to be limited at first glance; there is a long list of classes in the course catalog, but the available upper-level and graduate-level classes per semester appears to be fairly sparse by comparison.

3.  At first glance there appears to be a very heavy emphasis on Java; it would be good to spread out things a bit across different languages in higher level classes.

Permalink Reply by Mark Nelson on January 16, 2015 at 2:08pm

ICS 613: E05 Three bad things about being an ICS student

I'd like to see people stop complaining about Laulima. I hear grumbles from all corners: Faculty, staff and students. I'd like to remind folks that:

1. It's a fairly complex web application. If they disagree, they are free to whip one up themselves.
2. It's better than the alternative... which is not nothing (the way us old-timers came up). No, the alternative is where every instructor foists their own pet (or home grown) classroom management tool on the rest of us. There are plenty of campuses where this is the norm.

I'm grateful for Laulima. It's not perfect, but it's pretty darn good.

At some personal risk, I'd like to ask the faculty to consider weather they want student to express an opinion or say the right thing.  I was in class the other day and the instructor puts out a fairly nebulous question "What is data?" -- to my astonishment, nobody spoke up.  He had to extract thoughts from the students one-by-one.  I'm not sure if it was more painful to do or to watch, but it made me think... is this the nature of students/young adults or are we conditioning this behavior?  I don't know the answer; it's probably some of each and a bit more -- but I'd ask the faculty this:  Please don't wack a student for taking a position and standing by it -- even if you disagree with it, remember to praise them for taking a stand and defending it.

And for my third 'bad thing', I'm going to pull up my soapbox and have a bit of a rant.  What's with the faculty abandoning their hard-earned honorifics and choosing to be addressed by their first name?  I get that Hawaii is laid back and nobody wants to be painted as arrogant or pretentious, but -- and maybe I'm old fashioned -- I think that a faculty position isn't easy to come by.  I think that, as a society we let a lot of traditions slide -- and I'm not bucking that trend.  I just don't see the upside of letting this tradition slide.  I think that professors and doctors should be addressed as such.  This is academia and I'm proud of it.

Postscript:  I agree with Patrick on all of his points, especially the emphasis on Java. We should be mastering C and at least one other scripting language.

Permalink Reply by Eric Wu on January 17, 2015 at 5:32pm

1. The availability of courses isn't constant throughout the year.  When I was an undergraduate, there were courses that I wanted to take but weren't offered when I had enough credit to guarantee a spot in the class.  It would be a decision to delay graduation for a course that could be offered the following semester or just continue onward to the completion of my degree.

2. There isn't a real ICS community based on my undergraduate experience.  There wasn't a place for ICS students to work on assignments or use as a study area like on the 2nd Floor of POST.  Perhaps if we did have a study area like the one on the 2nd Floor, it could have students making connections and finding others with similar interests to start creative projects.

3. Lack of ICS related clubs or extracurricular.  We do have Grey Hats, but not everyone is interested in security.  There was an ACM chapter that was started recently, but it seemed to have vanished for a while and I haven't heard anything about it afterwards.

Permalink Reply by Rob Namahoe on January 19, 2015 at 12:14pm

1.  I still think the ICS curriculum should be standardized throughout the entire UH system. Prior to enrolling at UH, I took a few ICS classes at the community colleges and although I did well, I didn't feel that I was as prepared as others in the ICS program who've been at UH Manoa the entire time. In my role as a TA, I've spoken to students who have come from the satellite schools and have the same complaint.

2.  I feel that class availability has always been an issue. Undergraduate classes fill up quickly. Graduate classes don't fill as quickly but there aren't very many of them offered.

3.  I would have liked it if we were exposed to a wider variety of IDEs throughout the undergrad/graduate program. Most of the programs I've written were done in Eclipse but I've seen job postings requiring proficiency in Visual Studio or Xcode, IDEs that we don't use as part of this program.

Permalink Reply by Jack Lam on January 19, 2015 at 5:00pm

1. Awkward Time Blocks - For some reason, the ICS department schedules Tuesday-Thursday time blocks onto Monday, Wednesday, and Friday which causes a lot of schedule conflicts when trying to take graduation requirement classes from other departments.

2. Frustration - Probably unique to ICS in the sense that debugging a program can take forever if one cannot find a line of code that is causing their program to run incorrectly.

3. Lack of Languages - I feel that the ICS program does not go in depth in the other programming languages enough. While we do teach the other programming languages in a few of our classes, there is not enough exposure to completely master the language. In addition, I personally think that our program should be more C focused than Java focused.

Permalink Reply by Paul Soulier on January 19, 2015 at 5:51pm

1) Selection of graduate courses available each semester is somewhat limited (e.g. haven't seen the graduate-level compiler course in 2 years). Also, it's difficult to plan anything since upcoming courses aren't provided until the end of the current semester and for the next semester only.

2) People sometimes think you have the ability to fix any broken computer or electronic device simply because you're a "computer person" :)

3) Of course, the hours required is always taxing.

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