Student Information

This page contains information that we hope will be helpful to your studies, including how to plan your course and where to get support when you need it.

Help and Advice

You are welcome to approach staff members for advice. If it is a matter concerning a particular course, you should in the first instance contact the course coordinator. For more general advice on planning, first contact the School Office and the staff there will direct you to the relevant adviser (download document to print):

ECS Student Advice - Undergraduate Studies

• AIML, CGRA, COMP Bing Xue
• CYBR, SWEN, NWEN Ian Welch
• EEEN, ELCO, RESE Ramesh Rayudu

ECS Student Advice - Postgraduate Studies

• AIML, CGRA, COMP (Thesis) Ali Knott
• ENGR (Thesis) Jennifer Ferreira
• COURSEWORK - ALL COURSES (Domestic and International) Andrew Lensen
• MSwDev Michael Homer
• MEP Ramesh Rayudu
• XMUT (ELCO) Yau Hee Kho
• WORK EXPERIENCE Lynda Turner
• MRE Alan Brent

For the rest of the Faculty of Engineering majors, you may wish to see:

SMS Programme Directors - Undergraduate Studies

• MATH Steven Archer
• STAT Yuan Yao (Priscilla)
• DATA Alejandro Frery

SMS Coordinators - Postgraduate Studies

• MATH (Thesis) Stephen Marsland
• MATH (Coursework) Hung Pham
• STAT (Thesis) Peter Smith
• STAT (Coursework) Ivy Liu
• DATA (Thesis) Peter Smith
• DATA (Coursework) Ryan Admiraal

SMS Lecturers (Teaching) - Undergraduate Studies

• MATH Steven Archer
• STAT David Cox or Tanya Gvozdeva

If a problem arises for which you would rather not approach the course coordinator or lecturer, feel free to consult your Programme Director or the Head of School.

ECS Student Support and Resources

For more information about the support services and resources that both VUW and ECS provide to students, please see our ECS Student Support and Resources link. There you will find information for health & safety, academic assistance, technical assistance, and social clubs, as well as support for our women, rainbow, Māori, international, and Pasifika communities.

Course Planning

You should plan your course of study as a coherent programme over the three or more years required. Usually, first-year students can only enrol in 100-level courses. In choosing your courses it is important to take into account:

• The overall requirements of the degree(s) you have chosen.
• The specific requirements of your major subject(s).
• Entry criteria for 100-level courses.
• Prerequisites for courses, especially those that have prerequisites in other subject areas.
  The prerequisite diagrams for the software and hardware may be helpful.
• Workload constraints: 60 points per trimester represents standard full-time study. Most full-time first-year students take seven or eight courses (105/120 points per year).
• Timetable constraints: draw up your own timetable to ensure you do not have any clashes. You may find the course timetable useful for this.
• There will generally be some choice about which courses you take, especially in your first year. This enables you to build a programme that can keep options open if you are unsure of your preferred major. There are many interesting courses around, and your specific interests may change as you advance through your degree.

Each major has its own requirements and advice. Please follow the links below to find out more.

• Requirements for the BE(Hons)
• Requirements for the BSc

You may like to consider extending your degree: it is possible to take a degree with a 'double major' by satisfying the requirements of two subject areas or to take a 'double degree' by taking two degrees from different faculties. Some sharing is permitted, so a double degree requires fewer points than the two degrees separately.

Important Dates

Victoria's home site contains the approved dates and deadlines for trimesters, withdrawals and holiday breaks.

Policies

Students should familiarise themselves with the university's student policies and statutes.

You should particularly familiarise yourself with:

• Academic Grievance Policy
• Student Conduct Statute and the Staff Conduct Policy (to understand your right to report improper staff conduct)
• Meeting the Needs of Students With Impairments

In addition, there are other important aspects of your study that you must be aware of:

• The support available to you as outlined in the Help and Advice section of this page.
• Victoria's plagiarism rules.
• There is a grace period that allows you to withdraw from courses early in each trimester. The deadlines for withdrawals are on the university's dates and deadlines page.
• There are policy tech notes detailing the rules surrounding computer laboratory access, conduct and printing.
• Postgraduates in CS should note the policy on using proofreaders for their thesis/project reports.

Expectations

ECS has a framework that provides guidance to both staff and students about what should be expected of students in courses from the 100-level to the 400-level. All ECS students should be familiar with this framework.

External Technical Information Sites

External Technical Sites contains links to external sites that provide technical information on various subjects.

Student Representative Meetings

Student Rep Meetings contains the agenda and action points for meetings between student representatives for each course and staff. -->

CareerHub

CareerHub is Career Development and Employment's Online Service where VUW students and graduates can search for job vacancies, career events and career resources.

Postgraduate Studies

See the Postgraduate Coordination page.

Recommended Laptops

At ECS we provide large laboratories with University computers in, and, to date, there are no courses that require a student to use their own machine. If you do decide to use your own laptop, we do have space in the labs to plug in your own device and we would recommend a laptop that has at least 8GB of RAM, at least i5 or higher model processor, and ideally 256GB or larger SSD. We do not require a powerful graphics card, not even for CGRA majors. However, if you do want to spend money on an advanced graphics card, please ensure that it supports OpenGL 3 or higher (almost all modern ones do!).