A change of direction.
Today I discovered that there is a limit to the amount of shafting that one person can stand. Whilst it is unpleasant to find that your being defficated on at work it doesnt matter when you consider that its only a casual job and that since the company have literally said they dont care about you then by the same token you dont have to care about them. But at Uni its a bit different, this is an institution that you pay thousands of dollars ever year to educate you NOT to fuck you about.
Well I missed the meeting between the Head of School, IBM management and the students in the Prof Prac course. Now dont get me wrong I didnt miss this intentionally, I have genuine intentions of attending the meeting at 11:30..... its just that the meeting turned out to be at 10:30. I had expected the meeting to be a bit of a faeces slinging match, because I can't see any way that IBM or the Uni would admit that the course is absolute horse shit and should be redesigned if not scrapped all together. As I understand it the head of the school basically stood up at the front of the meeting and systematically shot down every question or criticism thrown at him with the rebuke "You expectations are too high".
Yes, clearly the expectation that the University and IBM would deliver what they originally promised is much too much to hope for, obviosuly a little bit or ORGANISATION is too much to hope for. This is a course where they cannot tell us what we will be studying more than a couple of weeks before a semester begins, the units that are exclusive to the course are universally poorly organised and seem to have little to no relationship to the real world, particularly the world outside IBM.
"Industry Awareness" for instance basically consists of randomly selected case studies and talks from IBM staff. The two sections of this course are not even vaguely related, but because of the carefully vague name of this units they can get away with it.
The industry applications unit (the next in the prof prac specific stream) is run by one of the university staff who is clearly, from what I have seen, extremely dedicated to running the unit well and determined to make the best of a bad situation, but it is a bad situation. The units basically consists of doing a mock up project using the IBM style of project management (sorry I cant give specifics due to confidentiality) which sounds like a good idea except for a couple of problems. Neither the students nor the teacher are IBM project manager.... So none of the pople doing the course actually know how to use the slough of forms that are required for the project. I think the straw may have been when one of the actualy IBM project managers came in today to the tutorial and basically said "Your doing the project backwards" (which is what he had all been saying originally).
So I've transfered out of Prof Prac.
My summary review of the course: The course is a good idea, industry experience, real world learning etc etc. The reality? Its poorly planned, even more poorly executed and no one (neither IBM or the Uni) gives enough of a fuck to try and fix it.
And the best part? Now I can do all the bloody programming units I want. Doing BIT my way I will have more programming units than most BCOMP students ;)
Well I missed the meeting between the Head of School, IBM management and the students in the Prof Prac course. Now dont get me wrong I didnt miss this intentionally, I have genuine intentions of attending the meeting at 11:30..... its just that the meeting turned out to be at 10:30. I had expected the meeting to be a bit of a faeces slinging match, because I can't see any way that IBM or the Uni would admit that the course is absolute horse shit and should be redesigned if not scrapped all together. As I understand it the head of the school basically stood up at the front of the meeting and systematically shot down every question or criticism thrown at him with the rebuke "You expectations are too high".
Yes, clearly the expectation that the University and IBM would deliver what they originally promised is much too much to hope for, obviosuly a little bit or ORGANISATION is too much to hope for. This is a course where they cannot tell us what we will be studying more than a couple of weeks before a semester begins, the units that are exclusive to the course are universally poorly organised and seem to have little to no relationship to the real world, particularly the world outside IBM.
"Industry Awareness" for instance basically consists of randomly selected case studies and talks from IBM staff. The two sections of this course are not even vaguely related, but because of the carefully vague name of this units they can get away with it.
The industry applications unit (the next in the prof prac specific stream) is run by one of the university staff who is clearly, from what I have seen, extremely dedicated to running the unit well and determined to make the best of a bad situation, but it is a bad situation. The units basically consists of doing a mock up project using the IBM style of project management (sorry I cant give specifics due to confidentiality) which sounds like a good idea except for a couple of problems. Neither the students nor the teacher are IBM project manager.... So none of the pople doing the course actually know how to use the slough of forms that are required for the project. I think the straw may have been when one of the actualy IBM project managers came in today to the tutorial and basically said "Your doing the project backwards" (which is what he had all been saying originally).
So I've transfered out of Prof Prac.
My summary review of the course: The course is a good idea, industry experience, real world learning etc etc. The reality? Its poorly planned, even more poorly executed and no one (neither IBM or the Uni) gives enough of a fuck to try and fix it.
And the best part? Now I can do all the bloody programming units I want. Doing BIT my way I will have more programming units than most BCOMP students ;)