First of all, many congratulations! You have overcome considerable competition to be selected for UCL-CS; this means that you are talented individuals with good A level results or their equivalent, who we believe have the potential to succeed at a challenging and worthwhile programme of study.

You are about to start an exciting and exacting journey – one in which self-motivation and self-discovery are as important as raw talent. We believe that learning is an active process – one in which you must take the lead; this alone makes the culture slightly different to that you have experienced at school. You are free to make your own choices; those who freely choose to work, to research, to learn will be rewarded – and these are the people we want to see as UCL graduates.

Our expectations are simple. We expect you to put commitment and passion into this course and into your options; it will be sufficiently difficult that being passive recipients of ‘knowledge’ that you then learn and reproduce is no longer enough. We will NOT hand everything to you on a plate; we will provide you opportunities to learn for yourselves, to discuss problems, and to work hard, and we will support you in this process. Those that follow this path will have proved themselves as talented people who can carry that talent through into real achievement.

If, at any point, you are experiencing difficulties, then we want to know about them, preferably before they become real problems. We have extensive support available for both academic and personal problems. This link describes the roles of various members of academic staff you may need to talk to over the first year, and the types of problems they will help you address. If in any doubt or you just want someone to talk to, you can always go to see the Departmental Tutor (room 5.07a or email G.Roberts@cs.ucl.ac.uk).

Kevin Bryson (k.bryson@cs.ucl.ac.uk) is the 1st year coordinator, ready to help with organisational matters and questions about options.

If any issue is such that you wish to raise it formally or anonymously, you may contact your course representatives.

Useful Information

There are two "survival guides" you should read: the first gives information of interest to all students; the second gives information of particular interest to first-year students.