School of Computer Science & Data

About the school

The School of Computer Science & Data is the largest at Northcrest University, with 3,400 students and 210 academic staff across five research groups. It has taught computing since 1968, when the department began as three people and a leased mainframe in the basement of the mathematics building.

Teaching is deliberately unfashionable in one respect: every student writes code by hand before they are allowed to lean on a generator, and every student takes a full module on the social consequences of the systems they build. Graduates tell us both decisions mattered more than any specific language they learned.

What you will study

1. Year one — programming foundations, discrete mathematics, computer systems, and the university-wide foundation sequence.
2. Year two — algorithms, databases, networks, plus your first elective pair and an optional research placement.
3. Year three — specialisation in machine intelligence, systems, security or human–computer interaction.
4. Year four — an individual dissertation supervised inside a working research group, plus two advanced electives.

Undergraduates join funded research from their second year. Last session 3100 of them contributed to work that was published, presented or exhibited.

Facilities

• Two teaching laboratories open twenty-four hours during term.
• A dedicated robotics workshop with machine tools and a supervised electronics bench.
• Cluster access for coursework, with priority allocation for dissertation projects.
• A hardware library that lends boards, sensors and instruments against a student card.

Where graduates go

Roughly half of our graduates enter industry directly, a third continue to postgraduate study here or elsewhere, and the rest split between the public sector, teaching and starting something of their own. The careers service stays available to alumni for life, not for six months.

Entry requirements