Choosing your first year courses

Starting your degree at ANU can be a bit daunting. After accepting their offer and filling out the relevant paperwork on ISIS, one of the most common questions we receive from new CS students is "What courses should I enrol in?". Hopefully this guide can answer some of those questions.

Four important tips

1. You don't have to choose your Semester 2 courses straight away. ANU's enrollment guide incorrectly suggests that you should enroll for second semester alongside your first semester courses; this isn't the case. In general, you can enroll in courses using ISIS up until the start of the second week of the relevant semester, and you can make further changes up until Census Date (usually 4-5 weeks into semester) with approval from CECS administration. Check the ANU calendar for specific dates. Take the time to enjoy first semester, get settled into the university, meet some later year students, and work out what you want to do then. Note: the only exception here is that rarely some courses (e.g. visual arts) have capacity limits, so it's beneficial to enroll early, but as a CS student, you won't have to worry about this.
2. Your degree plan on Programs & Courses is just a guide, not a hard requirement. You have to complete the compulsory courses for your degree at some point, but it doesn't necessarily have to be in the specific semesters suggested in the plan. Studying a double degree and want to focus on one degree more than the other in your first year? Go for it. Studying part-time and can't fit in all of the recommended courses? That's fine. Want to save those electives till later when you have more choices? Probably a good idea.
3. You can take courses in any order you like, as long as you meet the prerequisites. For example, there are some 2000-level courses with no (or few) prerequisites, which means that you may be able to take them in first year. However, the expectations and assumed knowledge of latter year courses are often higher than 1000 level courses, so make sure you know what you're getting into. Talking to previous students and the convener of the course can be a good way of judging whether you're ready.
4. Prepare yourself for the future, but leave room for changes. Some 1000-level courses are commonly required as prerequisites for latter year subjects, so it's important to get them done sooner rather than later. Others, such as MATH courses, aren't always listed as prerequisites, but can be extremely helpful later on depending on your field of study. Hence, it can be helpful to have an idea of what you want to study in the future. However, don't rush ahead and plan your courses for the next 4 years - it's common for students to change their degree plans after taking a few courses and discovering an entirely new field that they really enjoy. Additionally, courses come and go as lecturers join and leave the university, and special topics courses (COMPx710) can provide a once-in-a-degree-lifetime opportunity to study something completely different. So it's best to leave some flexibility in your degree plans.

Important courses

If you're studying one of the CECS degrees (BAC, BAC R&D, BIT, BSeng), then most of these will be compulsory already. However, if you're a science student (BSc, PhB), they may not be mandated, so we recommend taking these courses early in your degree.

All of these courses are common prerequisites for 2000-level and above COMP courses, because they teach important foundational skills. If you don't complete all of them, you're probably going to have to request a lot of permission codes later on, which will pose many difficulties.

Semester	Course
Semester 1	COMP1100/1130
	MATH1005/MATH2222
Semester 2	COMP1110/1140
	COMP1600

Both COMP1100 and COMP1110 have 'Advanced' versions which are available for you to choose. These are strictly optional - they aren't worth any extra units, you don't gain extra marks for doing the harder course, and they don't count as prerequisites towards extra courses (with the exception of COMP1130, which is a prerequisite of COMP1140). Generally, you can expect a small amount of additional course content, different (more challenging) assignments, and interesting guest lectures. Overall, they can be a great learning opportunity and will allow you to push yourself to new heights. We recommend giving them a go during the first few weeks, and then decide whether you want to continue - usually, you can drop down to 1100/1110 up until fairly late into the semester. Just keep an eye out for the assessment policy - usually your advanced course grades so far will follow you to the non-advanced course.

Science students may wish to take COMP1730 instead of COMP1100/1130 in first semester, especially if you don't plan on doing many COMP courses in the long run. For more commentary, read each of their course pages on the wiki, or see below.

Note that MATH2222 is a very difficult (but fun!) proof based maths course. The workload can be high, especially if you are doing 1115 concurrently. Know what you're getting into!

General elective advice

• Your options are quite limited in first year - delay electives
• Do something completely random - you have freedom in first year!
• MATH is important, especially when you have first year energy

Specific course options

Semester	Courses
Semester 1	COMP1710, COMP1730, COMP2620, MATH1013, MATH1115
Semester 2	COMP1720, COMP1730, COMP2400, COMP2700, MATH1014, MATH1116

COMP1710

• HTML, CSS - if you have previous web development experience, this will be easy
• The content is quite outdated and the teaching quality is rumoured to be poor

COMP1720

• Fun
• Different

COMP1730

• Teaching quality vs 1100
• Concepts taught - is it enough for long-term CS students?
• Usefulness as a one-off-course
• Doing it in addition to 1100: maybe, but if you have previous programming experience, not worth it

COMP2620

• Prereq of 12 units of COMP/MATH courses, but can be waived with a good argument and/or good maths background
• Good prep for COMP1600 in second semester
• Great for people who enjoy maths, proofs or logical things

COMP2700

• Good intro to cybersec and cryptography
• Regardless of the listed prereqs, it mainly needs experience with an imperative programming language, and modular arithmetic
• If you have good maths + programming background, you may be able to waive
• Good if you are planning on doing cybersec major, but beware - 3703 is probably best left to wait until after you have done 2300, which means that you'd take it in 3rd year; so possibly no benefit to accelerating

Some courses from other fields

• ENGN1211 - learn the basics of Engineering, build a robot maze navigator!
• ENGN1218 - electronics basics (see also: the subsequent course, ENGN2218)
• STAT1003/1008 - introductory statistics
• ECON2141 - introduction to game theory

Speedrunning

Do you have substantial computer science experience prior to university? You may be able to get a permission code to enroll in a later year course that you don't meet the prerequisites for. However, there's some things to watch out for:

• CECS is stingy with perm codes
• Formally relearning can be valuable
• May not benefit in long run (e.g. you need more strict prereqs for the follow-on courses, so no advantage to accelerating)
• Greater formal and informal expectations of prerequisite knowledge
• You may appreciate the course more if you wait until you have proper background.

Here be dragons. Proceed with caution.