Taking that extra year means losing a bunch of money, since I have to take an extra year of student loans and I lose one year of potential income, but I feel like I need it, and I like being a student, and even though people tell me I'm a girl studying IT, so I shouldn't bother with improving my grades, I think that is a crappy excuse for having poor grades.
Hey - I'm going to start studying IT this autumn (datateknologi @ UIB), so if I'm having trouble getting something, I can shoot you a PM, right? Also, how bad is it that it's a year since I last had maths, and I remember pretty little? I'm good at maths, but if they assume that everyone is up to date with their maths, I'm afraid I'll be struggling from day one.
Sure you can. I might not be able to answer, but I could try or at least try to guide you in the right direction. I don't know how much maths you have at what I'm assuming is the bachelor program, but from what I can see, you have some intro to maths-thing? I know that at least at NTNU, a couple of the math classes are fairly simple, while the ones you take in the, uhm, sivilingeniør-programs can be pretty tough. The main thing, though, is to work consistently throughout the semester – I had a 6 in maths every semester from 8th grade to the last year of high school, but failed my first math class at uni (I'm in one of the sivilingeniør-programs, datateknikk) simply because I wasn't used to the workload, and I was used to having to do very little to achieve good grades. I'm still struggling to get past that mindset :p However, if you have a fairly decent grasp of maths, then you should be fine. Not everyone starts studying right after high school either, so it's not like you'll be alone in not having had math for a while, and from what I could find on the UIB website, the MAT101 class doesn't look too bad. MAT111 looks a little bit trickier, but that might just be because I don't like a couple of the topics covered.
Also, to all the computer people on the forums, I've started using Microsoft's SmallBasic, just to get a feel for what programming is like. Is that a good starting point? Is there better starting points?
I've never used SmallBasic, so I don't know anything about it, but honestly, a lot of what programming is about, is getting familiar with and learning to think in the right way, and for that, most languages should be fine (PHP is often recommended as something that is easy to get into, and easy to achieve results from quickly, but languages like Python and Java (which is what they use in the intro courses at UIB and NTNU) are also good). Learning about variables, data types, using conditionals (if, switch-case), for and while loops, methods/functions and things like that are the key thing, and if you grasp that, then adjusting to the syntax of a new programming language is the "easy" part. I've been a student assistant in NTNU's equivalence of "Introduction to IT", and the ones who grasp those concepts are the ones who end up not struggling too much, while some people still didn't understand what a variable was after 4 months, and that makes programming slightly tricky.
I'm not sure how well-documented SmallBasic is since I've never used it, but I would definitely choose something well-documented to start with, and this includes things like PHP, Java, Python, C/C#/C++. It just makes things so much easier – we had to work with a programming language called Oz in a class once, and the small amounts of documentation were pretty damn frustrating. It's not a very well-known language (no one I have mentioned it to who haven't taken the class has heard of it), but our lecturer liked it and it was the language used in our book, so we had to use it. I don't think I've ever been that frustrated with a language before.
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Topic: Blog Thread III : Look Who's Blogging Now (Read 915765 times)