The life of a CSE

[Steve]

For those of you that don't know, I'm not just HEXUS News Editor. I am also a student of Bristol University, studying Computer Systems Engineering (CSE).

CSE is, I guess, quite a niche course. People might liken it to Computer Science (CS), but CS here at Bristol have ~90 people in the first year... there are 15 of us CSEs. CSE is like CS in some ways though. Perhaps the best way to explain CSE is that it's like a jumble of CS and Electronics Engineering. It's not just about algorithms, programming, leveraging hardware and new technologies. It's about all that and developing those new technologies. It's like CS but with an understanding that reaches deeper into the silicon.

So, for somebody who is bonkers about computers, it's a lot of fun. I've learned three programming languages this year: C, Java and Haskell (no, not Pascal). I've done various laboritory sessions, playing around with frequency sensitive circuits and operational amplifiers. I've also played around with a 16MHz Motorolla CPU, telling it to do stuff in assembly language (feel the powah!)

Then there's discrete maths, which is fine, but the other maths, oh boy. Engineering Maths... what a killer. Some of it will be useful, invaluable in future years, in fact. But some of it just isn't interesting, and it's hard to get boring stuff to stay in my brain.

So, with exams less than two weeks away, there's a lot of work for me to do. That makes it hard for me to do a lot here at HEXUS, which is even more of a strain when a lot of the staff are out at CTS and E3. Still, we'll get by, and I'll get by. Some of my units are hard, really hard, but if eng maths is the only one that's really got me worried, I think I'll be alright.

If anyone's thinking of going to uni in a year or so, and wants to know anything about CSE (or CS, for that matter... or EE somewhat) feel free to ask me