It’s become very much second nature to check a diary of some sort and to see assignments aplenty staring back, so knowing that the final deadline had been met was a mixture of relief tinged with a weird sense of sadness. Now, with only two exams left, it feels like I’m on the home stretch of University and academia as a whole – slightly terrifying, but equally (if not more so) exciting!
My relief mainly came from getting through what’s usually the most challenging spell of the academic year, when assignments can often start to pile up. This three or four week period after Easter and just before exams is what everybody comes to know as ‘deadline season’, when every module competes to set deadlines which give you enough time to assimilate and apply the material covered before the holidays, while still allowing you enough time to actually produce the work. There’s plenty to get done, as reflected in the number of fellow students flocking to the ever-useful Hartley Library!
The result can often be something of a mad rush to keep on top of lots of assignments at once, particularly when the topics covered are as eclectic and interesting as those I’ve experienced. It’s sometimes quite difficult not to get so into one assignment, researching it more and enjoying it, that you neglect the others you’re tasked with, like with a design module I recently undertook - I spent most of my time on drawing up interface sketches, and nearly forgot about the written report element!
Likewise, deadline season is one of those times where the more you get done in advance (for example, at home over Easter – easier said than done when there are so many distractions!), the less pressure you’ll be under when the deadline date looms. Luckily, although I’d be the first to confess most of my Easter was spent reading for pleasure and career-researching, not to mention catching up with very important television, I’d covered enough ground with my work that I’ve been dealing with a very manageable workload. The end result of it all, though, is hopefully something I can be proud of.
I think one thing which people perhaps might not associate with my course in Software Engineering as part of the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) is a surprisingly vast element of creativity. Quite often you’re tasked with quite an open project brief and asked to apply the theoretical aspects you’ve learned to an idea you might have. The end result is usually a project that’s personal to you, featuring your own creative input, while also academically quite progressive, and in this way you begin to build up this portfolio of ideas which even, one day, might be taken forward commercially (with the permission of the University), giving you plenty to talk about in conversations and interviews alike.
This isn’t just your dissertation or research projects, although these generally form the crux of such discussions – having spent so long on it last year, I still feel like I could talk for hours about my work on automated camera selection in footage of theatrical shows!
From first year assignments, where we were tasked with building a personal and professional website (although I’ve not quite updated it since!), to creative programming exercises including an app which produces solvable crosswords (a few late nights went into that one – I kept getting distracted by playing!), to research-based tasks like one I recently handed in (the design of a biometrics-based feature extractor and classifier), the ball is very often in your court.
The traditional celebratory ‘hand-in selfie’ my group took following our Group Design Project submission in January, featuring many bleary eyes!
It’s this sense of personal attachment which not only makes coursework assignments so interesting (particularly in terms of that link between course content and your own ideas), but which also drives you to want to achieve the best results you can – if more out of personal satisfaction than anything! Although not every coursework assignment follows this format, and you probably won’t enjoy every single one (I’ve always struggled with some of the heavier Maths-based content, for instance), it’s great to have such a variety, particularly in terms of the skills you pick up along the way.
And so, with only exams left to revise for before I face the real world, I’m glad to say I’m relatively proud of the portfolio I’ve amassed, and look forward to trying to present it in future interviews. That is, once I stop getting distracted by that crossword generator…!
Robin
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