Advanced Computer Science MSc

The best thing about the MSc in Advanced Computer Science course was the friendly atmosphere. There are lots of great professors that I got on with really well, especially my supervisor.

What I enjoyed the most was the environment and the friends I made, from many different cultures and nationalities.

I am currently working for a company called "Coexis" in London. I am working here as a Software Developer. This company is a software house and they develop systems for Investment Banks. I have recently finished my training and will soon be allocated to a project.

I chose to study at Lancaster for a combination of reasons. One of them was the fact that it is very well acclaimed for its Computing Department. But also I found the campus lifestyle and the actual layout of the University really appealing. It’s almost its own little village away from the town; it seemed a really nice University.

I really enjoyed a lot of the practical sessions, such as being able to get out of the lecture theatre and actually make and do something useful with your work. It made you realise that what you’re actually learning can be used in a practical sense.

I found the facilities, particularly in the MSc Labs, really good. To have your own dedicated Lab, where you can get a computer at any time of the day when you really need it, was invaluable. It provided you with your own swipe card access, good availability with printers and all the additional software in the Library. The Planning of the MSDN was another real benefit, you could actually get your hands on some tools that were really useful, and which would otherwise cost you huge amounts to buy. The Department is able to actually supply them to you whilst you’re on campus.

The great thing about my MSc project was getting to work on something with a PhD group, to make a project that was hopefully going to be used in the end. It felt meaningful to be doing work that you knew, somewhere down the line, was actually going to get used and it wasn’t just going to be marked, put to one side and never really seen again.

I made a lot of friends as I studied my Bachelors here as well as my Masters; I got to meet so many different kinds of people. It is going to be really weird leaving because it’s almost like having a different family up here at the University.

Before studying the MSc in Advanced Computer science, I was a student on the undergraduate Computer Science course. I initially chose Lancaster as a place to study as it was apparent that the area had a brilliant community, of which I wanted to be part of. The staff are very enthusiastic and willing to help and discuss their subject. This is also true for the staff outside of the Computing Department, of whom I liaised with for some of the non-computing matters in my dissertation.

The course was challenging but highly satisfying, containing the perfect blend of theory and practical based coursework. I particularly liked the free reign of thought that truly enabled you to make the course your own. My dissertation involved looking into the identification and detection of different forms of the English language in Twitter feeds. The ultimate aim of creating an automated utility which was capable of translating ‘text speak’ into Standard English using statistical techniques.

Lancaster has been a wonderful home for me, and it was for this reason that I chose to apply the skills I had obtained from my studies in the Lancaster area. Currently, I work on campus in the Lancaster Environment Centre as a Website Developer for the National Biodiversity Network project. At some point or another, the relevance of each of the modules I studied during my MSc has been apparent, even in seemingly unrelated topics that come up during work. However I am readily using my knowledge of Human Computer Interaction to build scalable web applications that can be used on a variety of devices.