OK, so I’ve effectively had my first week back at Uni now. I say effectively because although it is only Thursday all my lectures for the week finished yesterday. In fact, I only have 6 hours of teaching booked in on my timetable per week. (4 hours on Tuesday and 2 on Wednesday). Suffice to say this is a very short week and far from representative of all the modules I’m doing.

I have 2 hours a week in something called “advanced internet application”. I have another 2 hours in something called “data management” and then a final 2 hours in “web mastery and network management”. I then also have a module called “managing the e-enterprise” which is an online module which involves an essay a week which is submitted and then feedback is received a week later. Then I have the heap that is my final year project.

Now it has to be said that in picking my final year project last year I seriously overstretched myself. It was in a lot of ways my downfall last year. I undertook a system of which each one of the 6 components was bigger than anything else anyone else took on. One of these components was a fully working webmail system to give you an idea of scale.

This year I have already made my pitch to the head of the school for my project. In fact, I did it Monday afternoon. This year my project will be an investigation into moving the functionality of a CMS from within the front end scripting language (such as PHP or C#) into the database engine itself taking advantage of the new levels of power and control in modern query processing engines and T-SQL.

The beauty of this project is it takes advantage of my interest in databases systems as well as being new, interesting and most importantly, without limit and as such, without end. This way I can work on it as much as I like without it having a clear end for which my result to be measured against. I agree there is a danger in this approach that I would fall short of the requirements, however, this is part of what the tutors roles is in helping me manage my project.

This first week has not been without it hiccups and oddities though. Firstly i was reminded over the course of a few lectures and tutorials how many stupid people are still out there. I saddens me to think that the last two levels of the course have not weeded them away. My favourite moment was when we were talking about Biztalk server (which is basically a business process manager. It allows you to set up the middleware or business processes of your applications in one place and it controls the workflow. Someone then asked if this was like exchange server… You what… you mean the e-mail server…. how in Gods name did they come to that conclusion. The two are so very far removed that you would have thought at least a level 3 student would see that…

Anyway, I’m sure I will get over it… Or they will go away…