Welcome to the final blog post! I have really enjoyed writing these blog posts, peeling back the layers of Computer Systems and revealing my beautiful cover photos. It has been a nice creative outlet over the last several months and maybe I’ll keep writing somehow…
A brief update on the last half of Semester Two…
COMPSYS 209 is insane. We just finished our interviews which is the big assessment that replaces an exam (it is worth 14%), it wasn’t too bad. Tomorrow is our final design demo and after that we will be done! We didn’t even have to build anything and 209 felt like a huge mission. This definitely took 3 or 4 times as much time as the other courses this semester.
ELECTENG 292 has been exploring the linear voltage regulator which combines both the transistors and diodes that we learnt in the first part of the semester. We also learnt more about the OpAmps you saw in ELECTENG 101, including how you can use them to make various Electronics building blocks like filters and triggers. We only have two tests and two assignments for this course so just the exam left!
ENGGEN 204 is… happening. We have a test tonight, wish me luck (from the future)! The test just covers the content of the last six weeks but it has a lot of seemingly disparate ideas including: Sustainability, Cultural Awareness and Health and Safety law. We also had a presentation (ours was about the food crisis) and an educational video about Kirchhoff’s Voltage Law. These assignments were all in teams of eight which can be stressful but my team was great and we
ELECTENG 204 (my elective) finished two weeks early! Apparently, if we were in person we would be too busy with COMPSYS/ELECTENG 209 to worry about this course. Luckily, we aren’t actually building anything so we just got some extra time to study. Checkout this screenshot from our last assignment (computational electromagnetics!).
A final note on Computer Systems
From a completely unbiased and central point of view, Computer Systems is the specialisation for you. No matter who you are. It has everything: Computers and Systems.
If you liked ELECTENG101 but William’s exam scared you: Computer Systems. If you enjoyed ENGGEN 131 but preferred the C portion: Computer Systems. If you want to work at NVIDIA or AMD and make the latest and greatest CPUs and GPUs: Computer Systems.
Computer Systems is generally more ‘specialized’ than Software or Electrical in terms of the specific things that Computer Systems does (e.g. Digital Systems Design, Embedded Systems or Cybersecurity) but people don’t realise that Computer Systems gives you strong skills in both Electrical and Software design. The comparison to Software is obvious because of its popularity but if you are interested in mechatronics but didn’t *love* ENGGEN 121, Computer Systems should interest you.
And that is all, really, all of it. I am done writing blog posts! I had fun. I hoped it helped some of you decide what specialisations to choose. Maybe I even convinced you to choose Computer Systems? If you’re interested in Software, maybe I got my way to second place? If you have any questions, you can email me at abai250 at aucklanduni.ac.nz or find me on Facebook (Alexander Bailey). Thank you so much for reading!