• Year 1: Consider taking MA1000 and MA1003

  The main idea behind the following suggested subject sequence in year 1 is to max out your potential in mathematics in year 1. This will help prepare you for possible honours study in year 4 by giving you much better skills breadth and extra ability to analyse using mathematics as a tool.

  Remember that if you find that you need to direct more effort to getting a HD result in CP1300 in semester 2, we can still switch you out of MA1003 for a less ambitious subject. Also, I understand that our friends in the Mathematics department will be checking on how everyone is going in MA1000 in week 2.

• Year 2: Excel in CP2001

  Please make sure you blitz CP2001! Doing well in the other CP2 subjects (especially Operating Systems and Architecture, CP2402) is also a good idea :-) Townsville students could perhaps look at offerings from mathematics while Cairns students could look at offerings from MGD.

• Year 3: Take CP3050

  With good results in CP2001 (and hopefully also great level 1 mathematics results), we encourage students to take CP3050 (Algorithms and Complexity).

• Year 4:

  Overview: there are 4 project subjects and 4 course work subjects in the honours year. The honours project is broken up into four 3-unit subjects taken 2 per semester i.e. CP4200 and CP4201 in one semester and CP4202 and CP4203 in the other semester. This project constitutes half of your load and it involves you working closely with a supervisor to undertake research leading to (usually) a thesis.

  The 4 course work subjects are designed to support your research and/or broaden your level 4 knowledge. The two subject that clearly support research are CP5080 where you develop the skills and practice the processes involved in a good honours project, while subject CP5090 helps broaden you understand how to read and write scientific papers (and broadens your IT/CS knowledge too). The other two subjects are electives that you choose - they both come from the IT/CS area when you are undertaking honours in our discipline, and common recent choices are CP5110 and CP5170. However, if you are doing a cross-discipline IT honours program (e.g. mainly IT but with some problem domain specialist work), you might negotiate with us to take graduate level subjects from another school. An example from 2006 has one of our honours students taking two AQ5xxx subjects from aqua-culture as the electives. Another recent example was a student who took an undergraduate biology subject and balanced that with a graduate CP5xxx subject.

  The Honours Program of year 4 was originally designed by A/Prof Bruce Litow and run by the honours coordinator at each campus. Each year, prospective supervisors offer projects for students to research - some general sample projects give an idea. One of the really interesting and "mind expanding" honours subjects is CP5090 - please check it out on the school web site, in Bruce's guide, and optionally look at some Cairns CP5090 Notes when we tried a group approach in 2004 (and yes, of course source code control was used on that web page).

• Thesis Project and Induction:
  • In general, I imagine the ideal project as somewhat open-ended to begin with but with the exact aims being determined once the project (or problem) area is better understood. You can contrast this against a typical 3rd year project where the kind of problem we solve is one that we usually know has a fairly straightforward solution. The emphasis in 3rd year is to practice applying the skills (analysis, design, implementation, testing, etc.) that we have gained from our other subjects. What distinguishes a good and bad 3rd year result might be aspects such as efficiency or elegance present in the final system, assuming that the system does fulfil its basic aims or milestones. In honours, good or bad outcomes still depend on technical issues such as efficiency and effectiveness (e.g. storage space, computation time, system scalability, human usability, etc.) but there is also a need for creative ideas to come from the student and the project breadth could extend over into other disciplines or import and apply concepts from other areas.

    The idea of an open-ended project might seem scary. Actually, by working with your supervisor, it is really an opportunity to do some exciting work. Here are some rough notes on thesis planning (from 2005).

  • Honours Induction Seminar (from 2003). We try to have the induction during O-week and have student project selection finalised by week 1 or week 2.

• Offers:

  Offers to undertake honours within the school are made early each year (usually January) based on the GPA of students who have completed the requirements for a BIT or BSc(CS), or a joint degree with IT. Ideally, potential candidates start discussing potential projects with possible supervisors at the end of the preceding year --- if you are reading this in the second half of your 3rd year, now is a good time to seek a meeting with academics and to explore possible honours projects. For further general information, contact the honours coordinator (Cairns: Jason Holdsworth and Carrie Lui; Townsville: Hossein Ghodosi) or the Academic Advisor (Phillip Musumeci).

Oct 15 2007