Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Computer Science and Engineering

This is the Second in a 5 part blog post series about every single department we have at Discovery Park.

UNT's College of Engineering at Discovery Park has 5 departments, each significantly different from the other, but with a few similarities.

  1. Materials Science and Engineering
  2. Computer Science and Engineering
  3. Electrical Engineering
  4. Engineering Technology
  5. Mechanical and Energy Engineering
Today's post will be about Computer Science and Engineering (CSE). This is my department, and I live here. I spend 20-30 hours here every week. Don't get me wrong, I love it. Never do something for that many hours if you hate it, believe me. That wisdom can be held true to just about any topic. The reason I'm in Computer Science and IT is because I love it. This semester, a lot of that time is spent working and doing homework. Studying at Discovery Park is much better than studying at home, in my opinion. There are plenty of tables set up and each have their own plug outlet for myself and friends/teammates.

CSE has several research wings and computer labs. One of the most popular being our LARC lab. That's Laboratory of Recreational Computing. What they do is game programming. It's headed by a man named Dr. Parberry and was founded in 1993. UNT's LARC was the first lab to offer courses in game programming in the United States and still remains competitive as it ranks in the Princeton Review's top 50 schools in game programming out of the 500 game programming schools out there. The alumni are consistently successful as Activision's recent "Call of Duty: Black Ops" team consisted of the LARC's very own Cesar Stastny as the Director of Technology.
On top of gaming, CSE has a million other opportunities. You could expect to be working at any tech company big or small. In IT I learn different languages ranging from Java(+JSP), C++, PHP, PERL, Bash scripting, MySQL, etc. Computer Science touches on some of these languages but delves into Assembly language, software engineering, algorithm and software design, etc. Computer Engineering degree goes into similar studies but focuses more on the hardware side of things including the parts inside a computer, game system, airplane, or war machine. The possibilities are indeed quite endless in engineering.

Regardless of your degree, the computer science department also houses the UNT Robotics Society, which I blogged about in this post. In robotics you could be learning more about C++ or even BASIC Stamp, and LabView. Again, there's a million things to do in engineering.