Today, we'll be covering a few different topics
regarding the whole idea of software. Essentially, what is
software engineering? What are potential career paths, how and
what exactly is software generic at UTS, and exactly some of the
subject pathways that you can pursue to get into that career
that you're really looking for. Of course, we'll end this
session off with a quick q&a. So if you have any questions, feel
free to pop in the chat. And we can answer a little bit later
here today. So, UTS, we offer a variety of different majors
under the Bachelor of Engineering honours. For this
session, we'll be focusing solely on software. But if you
just look on the screen, you can see that there are so many
different types of majors that you can go into. Here at UTS, we
like to emphasise that you can do very much flexible type of
major where you can just dabble in a lot of these different
areas. And then finalise later on, if you look on the screen,
you can also see that there's an asterix on some of them, those
just mean that you can particularly do a double degree,
where you can see in the grey box area with those other
degrees. For myself, like I said beforehand, I do a double degree
in engineering and business. So I'm coupling those two together
and majoring in software. So you probably wondering a little bit
about what is software engineering, I would just read
the slide, but I'll give a little bit of my own particular
definition of why I believe, at the very end of the day, I
simply put it as we're here to solve critical problems. If you
have that mindset of problem solving. If you're looking to
innovate in your own particular way. This is probably a great
career path and potential area of education for yourself. If
you're looking to understand why he should study software
engineering, the future is becoming more technological.
Some of us say that we're entering a new sense of an
industrial revolution in the sense, and being a software
engineering just helped pave the road down that path. At UTS, we
like to say that we are very much future focused. And with
software engineering, you definitely reside with that
particular say, Now, of course, what we when you come in with
future focused mindset, we have to do so with a mindset of
tackling real industry problems. And of course, those problems
have to be tied to sense of global demand. And when you
pursue an engineering degree at UTS, you're globally recognised
for particular areas, across different companies that
recognise your degree as a credible education source. So
you're probably wondering what particular areas of software
that you can apply your degree towards. For myself, I have
dabbled in web development, I've done a little bit of machine
learning applications, mobile development, and the list goes
on. You can choose to dabble in many different areas, especially
at UTS itself. But it's ultimately up to you to choose
and pick your own journey and what you want to specialise in.
A lot of people love going into the hardware and IoT
applications, the Internet of Things Some people love,
specialising in cloud services, and software as a service. So
ultimately, if you have any questions about what these
things are, feel free to publish that later on. And we can dive a
little bit more into the nitty gritty details. The premise of
computer science and software engineering is that computer
science is way more theoretical. And with software engineering,
it's way more practical. So in this sense, if you look at
computer science, if you're very interested in say like
mathematics, computational processes, then computer science
is probably the way to go. But if you're looking to understand
the whole software development lifecycle of understanding user
requirements, tying those user requirements to specific key
products and ideas, and then producing those into a
production, which customers can actually utilise in software
engineering probably is a great pathway for yourself. So the
question really comes down to what is the challenge, right?
When you come into like a technological space, you know,
innovation is great. Everyone has great ideas, but you also
have to consider is it feasible is a suitable? Is it robust
enough for to be an actual product out into the world
itself? You can actually take real world example for my own
case, which I think a lot of us probably have understood or even
been aware of in the last year or so. We're going to
Coronavirus pandemic. Last year the government rolled out
a contact tracing application. And in that contact tracing
application. It was meant to solve the problem of how do we
track particular individuals, right, who have been exposed to
Coronavirus and how do we make sure to track those who have
been in the same proximity as those with Coronavirus now The
government released a particular application that was supposed to
do those. But it did experience some problems, of course. And in
their sense, they really want to say that was an innovative
experience or application to solve this particular problem.
But they showcase that there were some issues in regards to
how many what were the technical issues that they were
experiencing, for example, iPhones and Android
compatibility, those issues with data ship. Additionally, there
was also some issues with how do we exactly get people to opt
into the application, as well as participate in that pool. So we
have this shared network of contact tracing within the
entire state itself. So as you can see, they had some
difficulties there. But understanding these challenges
helps to produce better products into the future. And you'll
definitely see this in many different areas within your
career if you do pursue a degree in a career into software
engineering itself. So anticipating the unexpected, as
well as being able to fit those user requirements about right,
it's something that you definitely need to consider.
There are so many different types of careers that you can go
into itself. A lot of these probably just sound like names
to you, but I can group these a little bit. So that becomes a
little bit more digestible. As you can probably see their
software engineering degrees development and DevOps DevOps,
meaning it's much more into like the database kind of area. But
once you get into like the designer, consultant and
architect type of career path that's bridging the gap between
the business and the technicals itself, so you have to
communicate with the software development teams, while also
constructing the architecture of how the technology will interact
with one another. And of course, if you'd like to go into a
little bit more of the front end, UI UX design, or being a
designer is a great place for you to fit into as well. So at
UTS, we this is just a very simplified course structure.
This is what we recommend to follow when you are enrolled
into the Bachelor of Engineering honours degree. As you can see,
we have the engineering core subjects, those are just
covering the basis as I mentioned beforehand, in regards
to dabbling in the different majors here UTS. As well as just
setting the foundations of your mathematical skills. You might
even cover physics, for example. And then you get into the actual
major specific subjects such as your software engineering
degree. And those usually follow a set course. But you also have
the option to select a few electives here and there, where
you want to specialise and learn about something that may be of
your interest. For myself, I want to learn a little bit more
about machine learning. So I took a few machine learning
courses here, UTS. And that's just the bias, diversify my
experience, it's really great for the resume and CV. So as it
bought the bomb, you can definitely see that there's a
diploma of professional practice. And usually a lot of
students opt in to do this diploma on top of their actual
degree. What this particularly means is that you get to six
month placement internship experiences, typically students
do it in their second year and do the second one in their
fourth year. This will just provide you another extra level
of credibility, especially when you're going out in industry,
when it's very, it's very important to have that practical
experience. So once again, I just want to emphasise that,
even if you don't think or know that you want to do software
engineering, we do say that engineering is very flexible.
Meaning that if you want to just go into a flexible engineering
degree at the start, that's perfectly fine. You can start
dabbling in different areas and different majors as you go on.
And then you can assign in your like second and third year on
what major you want to pursue for the rest of your degree. And
of course, you can pick and choose your journey. And I like
emphasising that because if you have specific interest in
different industries, then you can combine that and create your
own sub major in that emerging area. As you can see, there's
renewable energy, there's advanced manufacturing, and the
list goes on from there. And of course, like I said, it's
flexible. So you can definitely dabble into different areas as
you see fit. So we're gonna go into Jasmine's own personal
experiences. Jasmine, do you want to jump on?
Thanks, Andrew. So hi, Ron, my name is Jasmine again, and I
study a Bachelor of software engineering with a minor in
interaction design. So basically, interaction design is
how a user interacts with the software. So buttons, UI, things
like that. So you eyes what you actually see. So I actually
started with a general engineering degree. So that's
what I went into here at UTS. That was for a few reasons. One
of them was I didn't quite make the ATAR to get into a software
engineering degree. And the other one was, I'm not I wasn't
entirely sure if software was the degree I wanted to do. So I
started with the general engineering, and that didn't
actually set me back at all. So I'm actually going to graduate a
little early, which is, which is quite nice. So I moved into
software engineering in my second year of university. And
that transition was actually very, very easy to do. It was
just changing your major. So I've really enjoyed the course
so far. As I mentioned, I'm doing interaction design. So
that's taken up four of my electives, and you get a total
of eight electives. And so I've got into both minor and explore
some other areas. So I'm going to dabble in games development
next semester, which will be interesting to see, I've never
done that before. And I'm going to graduate next year, which is
very exciting. So I've got to look into finishing my degree.
And getting through all that. So I've done most of the course at
this point. And I've so far, I've really enjoyed it. So in my
first year, actually, I joined the Motorsports team at our
university. So what the Motorsports team is, is they
design and they build a race car Formula One style from scratch
every year. It's a big deal, big feat, a lot of mechanical,
electrical engineering students. But at the time, they had no one
in software. And my sister was on the team. So she studied
mechanical and mechatronic engineering. And so she
mentioned, hey, come join us see what you can do. And so I did,
and but I joined in my second semester of my first year, and I
knew nothing about software at this point. I barely knew how to
code something on my own without a course requirement. And so it
was a very big journey for me. But it's really what sort of
sparked me to go out and learn on my own and really develop my
skills in the areas I was most interested in. So I ended up
developing two software programmes in the two years I
was with them. And they were both for telemetry which
telemetry is basically of sensors on your car, maybe your
speedometer, for example, and your regular car. And it's how
do we show that to people so that they can interpret it and
make decisions based on that. So that was sensors on the car that
I was reading from and I displayed them. So the first
time it was more about how do I actually create this. And then
the second time, it was more about how do I make this very
easy to digest. So you have all of this data, it means nothing
to me, I don't know anything about the physics of a car, but
I just wanted to make sure it was very easy to digest. So I
learned a lot about what I was most interested in through that.
And I really refined my skills, which I really recommend going
outside of your coursework to really discover what you enjoy.
Because it's such a big industry, there's so much you
can do. And so it's really good to double while you're still at
university and you have so much time and you're keen to still
work you still in that learning mindset. So as for my
internships, so I do the diploma as well, which means I've done
two six month internships where I'm actually on my second one
now. So I've done two summer internships with Google, and I'm
currently on a six month internship with Apple. So big
names. But they've been really enjoyable. And I can honestly
say I don't think I would have felt as prepared for either of
them. If I hadn't had that Motorsports experience. And I
hadn't dabbled outside of my coursework. I really, I learnt
how to teach myself and how to ask for help through that. So
the two internships are incredible. So the two ones at
Google were both as a software engineer, I was put on a team.
So my first one was on Google Maps. And my second one was on
what's called a site reliability engineer. So basically, the
people who maintain a software and make sure it keeps working.
So if there's an outage on an app, then an SRO team will come
and make sure that that gets fixed, and that it doesn't
happen again. So both of those are really incredible learning
experiences, I had the most amazing mentors, the programme
is incredible. And if you've ever watched the internship, the
movie, it's very much like that everything's free. I put it in
quite a few kilos that summer, just eating, there's so much
food, but it was an incredible learning experience. And that's
really what you take away from it. And then I'm currently at
Apple. And that is a completely different experience. So this
one's a bit longer, it's six months instead of three. And
I've really got into experience the whole software lifecycle. So
when I joined, they basically said, find a problem in our
office and fix it. And that was it. And so that's a very vague,
you have to work through a lot of ambiguity. But I got there,
you sort of start breaking up the pieces little by little. And
eventually you get there. And so I'm about two and a half months
in and I've got my idea and I figured out the problem and I
can really justify that. And so that's also part of the software
experience is finding the problems you want to fix and
figuring out are they really going to benefit people and
being able to justify that as a means of is it worth creating.
And so that's been the best learning experience so far for
me. I think software engineering you Think coding but but really
thinking about the whole software lifecycle and how you
create these products. What are you creating has been really,
really incredible full name. So that's all about me. Let me know
if you have any questions, and I'll answer them in the chat.
But I'll pass over back to me.
Thank you so much for that. Jasmine. That's a really cool
story. You had a really cool University Korea, who seems
Awesome, so. Okay, we'll go to the next step. HSC subject
selection. So what specifically do you need? UTS does not have
any prerequisites, we do recommend maffs, extension one,
and advanced English as well as Physics for all engineering
courses. But we don't assume you have any IPT or software design
development, although that does help. So adjustment points,
these are points that as you guys know, added to your ATAR.
So you Ts does give up to 13 adjustment points. That is
including from completing the UTS engineering and it
questionnaire which is how I personally got in good results
from you know, relatively relevant HSC subjects, gender as
well as special considerations such as COVID, and more. Yeah,
awesome. So this is the university application process.
And I might be a lot to take in, of course, you guys will get
these slides at the end. So you can have a far rate. But
essentially, how this works is we've got open day coming up
August 28. Our scholarship applications are currently open
so you can check out and see if you have any scholarships you
might be eligible for. awesome news is that the UTS courses and
now in UX so you can actually go into you like now on select your
courses and seeing what what's going on there. And of course,
le offers are given out January's August. Now, as many
of you guys know, because a lot of the attendees from as well as
the HEC, September to November. However, from December all the
way to March, there are different rounds that you walk
offers for you know, any courses that you've applied for. So you
can of course change your preferences if you don't get
into the in the first or second round. So next is student
support. So some of you may be asking, Well, what if I don't
know maths or physics or etc. So we do have bridging courses
offered for maths and physics as well as chemistry. So yeah,
that's something you guys can consider. I personally did a
physics bridging course it was a few weeks before my first
semester and it really kept me up to speed. And then of course,
you've got your past which is pieces to study success. So
essentially, someone from a semester or two before for a
subject helps you out with the subject, if you have any
questions and of course you always got tutors and lecturers
that will help you understand anything. And finally, just to
connect digitally, this is some ways you can access us if you
have any questions engineering@ucsd.edu.au or as
you can see the email on our socials.