As my Master’s Program comes to a close, I thought it might be interesting to write up a brief review on my last year in the MSc Computer Science - Negotiated Learning program at University College Dublin.

It’s been a very long (and densely packed) year, so I’ll be breaking this up into parts based on trimester. Starting with my first trimester in Fall 2022, I attended my induction into the program in early September, and a week later, classes began.

My course load for the first semester was as follows:

• COMP30390: Enterprise, Innovation, & Entrepreneurship
• COMP47230: Introduction to Cognitive Science
• COMP47750: Machine Learning with Python
• COMP47930: Augmented and Virtual Reality
• IS30380: Digital Storytelling
• STAT40720: Introduction to Data Analytics (Online)

I’ll go through them in order of course number, give some details on the course, and reflect a bit on my personal experience.

Enterprise, Innovation, & Entrepreneurship

Taught by Professor Damian Dalton (great alliterative super hero name btw), this course was a thinly-veiled public speaking class. The first half involved lectures on startups and entrepreneurship (historically, globally, and as it pertains to Ireland and the EU), particularly as they relate to the technology field. I thought this was all quite interesting, but a bit disheartening, given that my student Visa (and future graduate Visa) status prevents me from being self-employed. Other than that though, it was still good information.

In the second half of the course, it was mostly student presentations on various topics relating to the course material. I got to hear other students discuss businesses and marketing campaigns that were interesting to them, and I shared my own experience with my indie game studio working in a startup incubator.

For the final project, we needed to read a business book (we were given a list of thirty to choose from), write a report on it, and give a 15 minute presentation on it. The book I chose was The 1-Page Marketing Plan by Allan Dib. It presented a lot of various marketing strategies and considerations (and how to condense them into a single-page format). A couple of them I didn’t really agree with and felt a bit predatory to me, but the vast majority were quite useful, and I wonder if I might have had more success in my own entrepreneurial ventures if I’d read something like this sooner and approached my business with a more marketing-oriented mindset. Overall, a useful and enjoyable course.

Introduction to Cognitive Science

My very first course at UCD, this class was taught by Professor Fred Cummins (who was also the program coordinator). An introduction to cognitive science, it explored topics that I’d never really spent much time considering before. It began with a brief history of Western Philosophy (with mention of alternative philosophies), and then covered the beginnings of the social sciences and technology that would all eventually merge to become the modern and ever-shifting field that is cognitive science. This was definitely one of the most interesting and thought-provoking classes that I took in my MSc program. The work for the module entailed a lot of academic reading, and two essays analyzing and criticizing academic research. (I chose language learning and depression therapies using psilocybin as the focus for my essays).

Machine Learning with Python

This course was an absolute whirlwind. Taught by Professor Pádraig Cunningham, it opened with a math primer, which was helpful for getting caught up again with some of the math we would encounter, but from the first day I felt like I’d been dropped in the deep end. It really wasn’t until very near the end that I felt I was starting to get the hang of the topics covered in the course, partially because this class was so densely-packed with information. The course focused on supervised learning, but touched on a little bit of unsupervised as well. There were large segments on evaluation methods, as well as ensembles, data exploration, and dimension reduction. The first assignment involved implementing a KNN algorithm, and ended up sending me to the Computer Science tutor center (where a very helpful PhD student helped me solve my off-by-one error).

The second assignment required predicting traffic based on historical data. The trick to it was first performing a bunch of data exploration tasks, and then adjusting linear algorithms to work with cyclical data. After all that, I still only ended up with about 66% accuracy, but it was certainly an interesting exercise. The course finished with a final exam at the Royal Dublin Society (RDS), and while I came out of that exam feeling like I did reasonably well, it felt like the exam had been graded a bit harshly. Thankfully not enough to do much damage to my overall grade.

Augmented and Virtual Reality

Probably the most fun class I had, AR/VR was taught by Professor Abey Campbell, who is deeply involved with XR technology research at UCD. The course was heavily focused on the academic side of the field, with weekly papers to read, and a final exam on those papers at the RDS worth 70% of the grade. The remaining 30% was split amongst three projects. The first was a simple AR project, where we used AR.js to scan QR codes and display an AR model on a mobile device. I ended up 3D modeling a little character that would wave when you tapped on the screen.

The second project was full VR using Unity. This was definitely my area of expertise, and I had my own Oculus (Meta I guess) Quest 2 to test and deploy on. It was fun setting up my development environment to work with VR, and I built a spaceship scene using Synty assets where you could interact a little with your environment to adjust the lighting and effects. This is definitely something I want to explore and play with more in the future.

The final project was a choice of AR or VR, so I stuck with VR in Unity and expanded my space concept. Frustrated with the time involved figuring out the input system and testing deployments though, I focused more on generating the concept for the prototype and doing a pitch for it, especially with what a small percentage of the grade it was worth. A VR space game is definitely something I want to revisit in the future though, and this was a fun module to help inspire interest for it.

Digital Storytelling

A third level Information Studies course taught by Dr. Páraic Kerrigan, this one had a lighter workload compared to the others (as it was aimed at undergrads), but was a lot of fun. The lectures and readings explored the progression of storytelling into the digital era, and how technology changes the way we share and consume media. This class made me feel a little bit old, because a lot of the ‘historical’ elements in digital storytelling are the things I grew up with, but otherwise the material was interesting and engaging. The first assignment was an essay about some form of transmedia. I went with what I know so very well, and wrote about Star Wars (focusing in on Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II, and how it follows the Hero’s Journey, same as so many other parts of the Star Wars saga).

For the second and final assignment, we had a choice of an interactive website or a five minute podcast. I went with the podcast, just because I knew a website would have devoured any spare time I’d been imagining. My very brief podcast episode was a short exploration of unionization efforts in the Game Industry, which was something I’d remembered seeing a lot about a few years ago, and then nothing had come of it. (This year that seems to finally be changing though). I found some interesting arguments both for and against in my research, which was different from what I had expected. It was clear though that even if unions weren’t the answer to the problems in the industry, change is still very necessary for the industry’s work culture and employee treatment.

Introduction to Data Analytics (Online)

This course was delivered completely online by Professor John O’Sullivan, and was part of the Statistics Department. I used to think that I had a pretty good handle on math and statistics, but by the end of this course I had a lot of doubts on that. I really struggled with the online format for this class, which made it often get lost amongst my other courses. Aside from that, the assignments were hard! There were some examples in the lecture materials, but not particularly close to what was being asked, and my math skills were definitely rusty, so the two assignments that we had to do in this class took up huge amounts of my time. It didn’t help that I was also having to learn R throughout the course as well. (I’m certain I’d have been able to do the work more quickly had the module been Python-based). The remainder of the course grade was based on a final exam (also delivered online). I managed to survive that, and my grade got a slight bump up after a curve was applied, but I was really thankful I didn’t have to retake this one. Besides learning some very useful statistics, and data analytics concepts, I also learned that I definitely don’t want to pursue a career as a data analyst.

Bonus: Irish Beginner Class

It wasn’t worth any credit, and there were no exams or official homework for it, but I also took an 8 week beginner Irish course to try to learn some more of the language. The class was initially taught by Sibéal, but she had a child towards the end of the course, so we finished with a series of subs, Siobhán and Aoife, who were both fantastic (and Aoife gave us a great background on GAA and county politics). We learned the Irish basics like greetings, introductions, talking about where you live, where you’re from, and what you do, and learning to count, tell time, and identify colors, as well as a bit of basic grammar. I was supplementing the course with Duolingo, and the two working together were quite nice. Duo helped a lot with my vocabulary, and the course was critical for understanding pronunciation, grammar, and spelling (which are quite tricky in Irish). Ultimately a great course, and I was inspired to continue on with it in my second semester.

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Anyway, that concludes my review of my first trimester at UCD. It was only 12 weeks of classes, but it felt like an entire year had gone by. There were so many events and clubs and societies going on while I was working through these courses, that I may just do a review of those when I finish these. These reviews are really mostly for me, but I thought it would be nice to have an easy record to share my adventures with people back home. I’ll have the next review out in the next few days.