Birkbeck, University of London

The overall experience has been really bad. There is little support from the university and very little contact with lecturers. Despite numerous complaints to the department, students concerns are often ignored. There are a lot of very disgruntled people on this course.

The whole experience has been a nightmare. I applied for the PT (2 year) course and after a few weeks it was reclassified as being full-time hours due to the huge workload. Trying to manage this course and a full-time job is soul destroying.

The Covid crisis did force everything online but now society is starting to reopen, yet the University are still only offering classes online. They have also made the exams harder “because they are open book” but really no one has time to look through notes during the exams. Also, while sitting the exam you need to keep an eye on your emails because that is how they announce mistakes on the exam paper. Out of the 4 exams I sat this year 3 of them had mistakes. I also managed to defer an exam until August but they only give you one week notice of the exam dates which is a nightmare when trying to book AL from work. The department is chaotic in their approach towards everything. Seriously, everything is so badly organised and dealing with them is very frustrating.

The course is marketed towards people who are new to Data Science/Computer Science and not from a traditional maths/science background. This course is a mix of people who are totally new to Data Science and people with a fair bit of experience which means there are lots of people frustrated with the pace of the course. Do not start this course if you have no prior knowledge of Python, data science, statistics… it is not worth it.

The teaching of the modules is very hit and miss with the added nightmare of everything being online. The video quality is ok but being online, there is no interaction and it can be difficult to stay engaged. The tutorials, which are live video calls, are all over the place. Some of the TAs are absolutely amazing while others are just dreadful. The big difference is getting people involved. The best TAs ask questions and expect answers. The worst TAs just talk at you.

The course itself seems like it has been mashed together. Most of the course so far has been very heavy on Computer Science with a couple of extra Data Science modules. Programming with Data has been the worst module. It is supposed to bring together ideas from other modules and fill in some of the gaps but really it is all over the place and not very engaging. The work set in the tutorial was mostly copying out code. There were 3 lectures about data ethics which were the highlight of the module.

The library has barely been open but they have been running a really good book delivery service. It is next to impossible to hold study groups and this has negatively impacted on the experience.