Enough fish on your plate?

I'm now into the third module of the Masters at Aberdeen (the course here is structured so that you get one module at a time, each for 3 weeks), and it's apparently the most difficult of the course. We're being taught RMI (in the most bizarre way), web services and J2ME.

I remember back in February or thereabouts, when I got an email about the Masters course, I was quite interested, so I looked through its website at the course content, and asked a friend at Aberdeen Uni to send me copies of past exam papers (which can't be accessed outside the uni's network). In short, I did research into the course, and from what I saw I thought it would be an extension of what I already knew from DBIT and SC.

Which is true. Except I thought I'd be learning more. So far the content doesn't go far beyond what I already knew. I could always blame DBIT for demanding so much of me in the exam (where we had to write DOM and SAX parsers), and having spent the last year using servlets was a help too. I think I just wanted something more taxing.

I was speaking to Ross at the weekend about the MSci at Glasgow, and it sounds like hell compared to what I'm doing - constantly high workload and no coding. In the latter respect I think I'm quite lucky to be in a Masters course where I get to code a lot.

Something I keep coming back to is Peter Dickman's talk to prospective students over the summer. He spoke about the various merits of different universities, not trying to exhibit bias, but finished by saying that 3 years at Glasgow is equivalent to 4 years elsewhere. I think now that 4 years at Glasgow is almost equivalent to this Masters.

But on the bright side, I've time to go out frequently, I've made new friends, getting to see the old ones more, and I'm getting paid handsomely for this.