As of year 2018, I finished my undergraduate software engineering studies at FIT CTU in Prague and I'm going to start my graduate studies in October the same year. For the today's post, I'm going to talk about my experience of the school.
The first year was probably the hardest because I had to get accustomed to the university system – understanding the credit system, how the lectures and tutorials worked and get used to the new environment overall. Nevertheless, it was very enjoyable thanks to my friends I met at school meeting course in September. We hung out with each other almost everyday and studied together. So if you are planning to study at FIT CTU, I highly recommend you to enroll into this meeting course which is led by older students.
As far as the courses are concerned, the mandatory courses are mostly well prepared and processed. Almost all of them expanded my horizons. There are still a few courses that I find completely useless but the most probable reason is because I have already worked in it before or I simply didn't care about the course. The first semester consists of six mandatory courses – BI-PA1 (Programming and Algorithmics 1), BI-PS1 (Programming in Shell 1), BI-PAI (Law and Informatics), BI-ZMA (Elements of Calculus), BI-CAO (Digital and Analog Circuits), BI-MLO (Mathematical Logic) and the timetable is created for you by the school.
After the first semester, you can create and manipulate with it however you want and it is because CTU FIT is adapted even to people without any knowledge in IT. So the first two semesters is fundamental for a person to choose which direction a student's gonna move along. Although, if a person's studying again, he can change it as he likes. The another specialty of FIT CTU is that you don't have to enroll into any programme at the start. You'll simply end with the field by accomplishing all the mandatory courses in the specific field you want to enroll into. Otherwise, the faculty provides a wide range of courses a student can enroll in and it is almost impossible to enroll in everything a person is interested in.
After the second semester, I enrolled into BI-WSI-SI (Webové a softwarové inženýrství, zaměření softwarové inženýrství) and to be completely honest, I do regret this choice. I was deciding between BI-TI and this and wrote the cons and pros on the paper but after evaluating these choices, I decided to go with BI-WSI-SI because of a simple reason. I wanted some experience and practice for the career. However, as I studied further, I discovered that FIT is more theoretical than practical, therefore I didn't get much from this programme. The programmed had been acredited again in 2015 so most of the courses in this programme were new. The BI-WSI-SI has five mandatory courses – BI-SP1, BI-SP2 (which are team projects and as everybody knows how the team projects with other friends work), BI-SI1.2, BI-SI2.3 (Software Engineering 1, 2 – a very good start point to the Software world but lacks of practice in my opinion), BI-PPA (Programming Paradigms) was great, BI-TJV (Java Technology, a new course and this could had been the best course. It was about enterprise java, however as the EA is huge it can't be covered in one semester.), BI-KOM (Conceptual Modelling, I found this pretty interesting) and BI-OOP (Objected Oriented Programming, I was looking forward to it but it was a huge disappointment. The 2/3 course was covered with the pharo, which is supposed to be a better (I think) Smalltalk but it is still in a phase of development and many things were just full of bugs, crashed upon every tenth action and I found zero documentation. Hopefully, they'll change it in the future).
The people at school are one of the greates thing about the university. Everyone is just so helpful and most of them answer in a few hours after you write them an e-mail. They are very helpful and enthusiastic with what they are doing, so they are very happy to help a person in needs. Most of them are students so the communication isn't that much formal.
In the end, I am very glad that I had the opportunity to study FIT CTU since it gave me very much and even though I still have a nightmare because of some courses, everything was very useful and if I would have to study again the bachelors I would only change my programme.