Studying at City
The best part of studying computing at City is
that right from the start you can clearly see how the modules that you
choose relate directly to the business world. The degrees offered give
a substantial grounding in your chosen field of study.”
Nadya Nathan,
current student
Our degrees are demanding, intensive and require commitment and motivation. In return you will receive a thorough, interesting and well-regarded education taught by highly-motivated experts. This will give you an excellent start to your career in the IT industry.
COURSE STRUCTURE
The structure of your degree is based around three parts, each corresponding to one year of a three-year degree. Commonality is emphasised as far as possible allowing you maximum flexibility to change your degree course once registered.
Assessment is usually by a combination of examination and coursework, though some components, such as the team project are assessed by coursework alone. Your final degree classification is calculated from your second and final years, with the weighting 40 per cent to 60 per cent.
A one-year placement is invariably taken between the second and final year. In the case of the Professional Pathway, Parts II and III are spread over three years.
Part I: Foundations
You will gain a firm foundation in computing covering topics such as programming, software engineering, computer architecture, databases and the mathematics needed to understand and model computer systems. Communication and business skills, essential for a successful career in IT, are also covered.
We offer a common first year for all our our courses, allowing you ample time to make an informed choice of which computing degree to study.
Part II: Core knowledge and skills
You will learn the core knowledge and skills needed in the IT profession, including topics such as networking and human-computer interaction. A group project plays an important role in developing your team-working skills in a software development environment. You will also study topics relevant to your specialism, such as data structures and algorithms for computer science, and organisational behaviour for business computing.
Part III: Advanced topics
You will have the opportunity to gain knowledge of your specialism and broaden your education by selecting topics from our wide range of final year elective modules. Your individual project will demonstrate to employers that you can apply your knowledge and devise a novel solution to a problem. Your project may be undertaken in conjunction with one of our research groups in artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction or software engineering. Alternatively, you may undertake your project with the company you worked for while on placement. For example, a current student is developing a system to help monitor and control costs in a blue-chip company.
ELECTIVES
We offer you a wide range of regularly updated elective topics allowing you to specialise or broaden your studies as you wish. Some, but not all, of the current electives are described below grouped by specialism.
Business Computing and Information Systems: Electives include business-related topics such as IT Management and IT Strategy that teach you how to manage IT in an organisation and the effects that IT can have on business strategy. E-commerce is also covered and our SAP laboratory allows you to study Enterprise Resource Planning, so you can ensure that once an order is taken by a website, it can also be handled effectively within the company.
Computer Science and Software Engineering: You can study the Theory of Computation to find out what computers can and cannot do and why, and prove whether or not a program will work using Formal Methods. City's research strengths in software engineering feed into the electives Software Metrics and Requirements Engineering.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Distributed Systems: Electives in Software Agents and Distributed Systems cover both how intelligent agents are built, and the underlying technology on which they run. Information Discovery shows you how machine learning methods are used to extract useful knowledge from corporate databases. You can also study AI technologies, such as neural networks and genetic programming, in the Neural and Evolutionary Computing elective.
FURTHER DETAILS
Our degrees are constantly changing to reflect trends in the industry and our most recent research. The current description of our programmes and the electives you can take can be found here. This document requires Abode Acrobat Reader, which can be downloaded here.