Computer Science

Choosing Your Course

The undergraduate courses available in the Computer Science department are Computer Science, Mathematics and Computer Science and Computer Science and Philosophy, with Computer Science and Mathematics and Computer Science having roughly equal numbers of places and the Philosophy joint course being relatively more niche.

In each of these cases, you'll be applying for a 4-year Masters course but can choose to drop out after 3 years with Bachelors if you choose to do so (typically done by students with job offers).

The joint courses are especially excellent choices for those interested in the intersection of Computer Science with either Maths or Philosophy and offer an exceptionally broad range of course choices in later years where you can pick almost any course across Computer Science and your joint subject.

For applications, none of the courses require any past programming knowledge but it is useful to have for the course itself. The main thing required is strong mathematical skills with Maths A-Level being a requirement and Further Maths too if your school offers it.

Career Prospects

The world today still faces a shortage of software specialists and companies are paying increasing large salaries to catch the top talent required to build the complex systems that we now use on a daily basis. A degree from Oxford is an excellent signal for landing job interviews and graduates are well known to have some of the highest average earnings of any degree in the UK, with the majority working as Software Engineers or closely related jobs.

The destinations of Oxford graduates vary widely including large well-known firms like Google, Facebook and Amazon, smaller but equally competitive firms and many also go on to further research in academia.

There is also a large entrepreneurial community at Oxford and several successful startups have sprung up in recent years, including some founded by past ISoc members.

Year 1

Known as 'Prelims', your first year provides a strong theoretical foundation for the remaining years with courses in core topics such as Algorithms, Linear Algebra and Probability that will be assumed knowledge in further courses in future years. The courses you take this year will all be compulsory which is usually seen as a relief in that you don't have to decide any speciality until your second year.

Year 2

Starting from this year, you'll have a few compulsory courses such as Algorithms and Models of Computation that build on Prelims (as well as compulsory courses in your joint degree if you are doing one) and are examined at the end of this year.

There are also a range of optional courses to choose from however these will be examined at the end of your third year so you'll do the majority of these in your third year closer to exams.

You'll also work on a mandatory but un-graded group project this year where you'll have the opportunity to work on a real-world problem in collaboration with a client that is partnered with the university.

Year 3

The third-year is largely similar to the second, with the same selection of optional courses but no compulsory courses so you have more freedom to select what you spend your time on. Additionally, for pure Computer Science students, you will have a project over the year that contributes to one-third of your final grade.

Year 4

The final year has more advanced courses that build on the optional courses you choose in Years 2 and 3 that are close to or on the cutting edge of the field with the assessments being a combination (two-thirds) of exams and (one-third) a research project of your choosing.

The exact projects available vary year on year and can be found on the website.