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What are three ways that the UH ICS program could improve?

If you can think of more than three things, then please limit your response to your top three!

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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.

Three ways the UH ICS program could improve:

1) Helping students find a direction in their ICS career: I think a problem most students struggle with is deciding what branch of ICS they want to dedicate their careers to. Though advising is available, there are only two advisors, one of them being a peer advisor and both often busy. In addition, advising can only give someone suggestions on what fields of interests they might want to pursue, without providing real experiences which can help the student decide if that field is to their liking. Simply telling students a general idea of "Security" and what classes they might take for it does not cut it. The student will not know what exactly being in the security field entails and how they will respond to it unless 1) they will somehow miraculously land a job in it or 2) they will take a class related to it. In either case, it will a large waste of time for the student to begin one of these tasks only to realize that it was not to their interest. Especially so for classes, which would have to be dropped within one week before recieving a W. Sometimes even, there is not enough variety in the available classes for the student to experience the path they chose.

In conclusion, I think that it would good to have some sort of introductory course (or even some sort of club) that would introduce students to the variety of fields available to them in ICS. Every week or so, a new branch of ICS would be discussed and the students would have to carry out actual tasks by workers in such a branch. It can incorporate actual workers, allowing for not only realistic advice but also social networking. By giving students a head start on deciding their futures in computer science, it will not only help them decide on their classes, but also increase their interest in the field.

2) Discrete mathematics Useful?: Though I haven't determined the truth of the statement, I have heard that discrete mathematics courses are being eliminated in many colleges. While I was in Discrete Mathematics 1 and 2, I admit that I had a hard time seeing the purpose of the class and participating only for the grade and the ability to advance to higher level classes. Now that I am beginning 300 level courses, I can start to see how discrete mathematics is integrated into computer science, but it is not as prominent as I imagined it would be, having had to take a whole year of it.

In this case, I am wondering if it is possible to eliminate the discrete math courses and instead incorporate only the necessary parts of those courses into the higher level courses it directly relates to. For example, introducing graph theory in data structures. I have found the courses often review such discrete math topics anyway. However, if I am somehow not seeing the true benefits of discrete math courses, I would like it if the discrete math professors would stress clarity and importance of their subject. My first professor forced us to solve excruitiatingly hard problems with poor explanations as to how to solve them -- or what they even meant. My second professor was an "easy A" but that only convinced the students more to pass the class for the grade rather than the learning. I think a lot more students would take their time to truly understand the concepts if they saw the importance in it.

3) Intimidation: As someone who went into the computer science major with little experience, it is quite the intimidating field. Since the work is often independent and based on learning on one's own, it seems as if there are many new students to the program who are much more experienced than yourself. In other fields, say chemistry, you hardly find students who have played around with chemicals in their free time, or worked in a lab. But for computer science, it is hardly surprising to hear others talk about using languages, software, ANYTHING you don't know. I've come to feel as if everyone around you is already ahead, though I know that there are many students in my classes who are just as clueless as I am. I can't say I have a solid solution for such a thing, but if the program could create clubs or at least be more supportive of newbies, I think it would be greatly appreciated.

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.

  • Industry connections: There are opportunities for tech students looking for jobs on the mainland but it would be nice to see more industry partners at our career fairs. I would like to see greater emphasis on keeping alumni of our programs connected with our ICS and CENG departments.
  • Direction and focus of our interests: CENG is a broad field with opportunities to focus on software engineering, embedded software, hardware etc. It can be overwhelming to focus in on a specific area while having exposure to such a wide variety of classes. I see ICS electives as a way of focusing our interests - which is great for CENG students with an interest in software. But for CENG students looking to do more computer hardware work, finding classes to help focus our interests can be difficult.
  • Course load: The suggested schedule of courses for those looking to graduate in 4 years can be difficult to keep up with, especially with the required electrophysics and systems engineering courses.

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