If I get good marks in IPT does that mean I will be good at IT? (1 Viewer)

[helpmehahaha]

Ever since I have done IPT (from year 9 onwards) I have gotten straight A's in my reports. My assignments are usually in the high 90's and my tests are in the 80's. I want to go into an IT degree after school however, I'm not sure if being good at IPT will mean I will be good at IT since I have been told that IPT is quite a lot easier. What does everyone else think?

 

[Drdusk]

IT is a broaaaad field. What part of IT specifically??
Fields such as information systems actually make use of the things you learn in IPT, whereas fields like programming are on a whole different scale.

 

[jazz519]

The assignments you do at school aren’t probably a good indication of what you would do at uni so you can’t say for certain if you will be good at it per say.

This is the case for every single degree. Your high school is just meant to be a foundation to learn harder concepts in uni. Like if someone did well in maths in the hsc and got a band 6, there’s no guarantee they are going to excel like that in uni maths where it would be more difficult.

However, the more important thing at your age is to not worry about if it’s going to be hard or not. Every degree will have its own difficulties and some people would be better suited to certain degrees than others. For example, I myself am very good at science and so although my degree would be extremely challenging for an average person, I do well in it because my thought patterns and interest lies in that area. At the same time I wouldn’t probably do as well in a law based degree or something with more essays because I don’t find that enjoyable or interesting

If you are a student who really enjoys the subject and is willing to put in the time and effort sure when you get to uni you can do well in IT. One thing to note though when you get to uni your marks aren’t gonna be everything like if you have a decent mark, experience will be more important. Unless you like plan to do phd or something

 

[Drdusk]

The assignments you do at school aren’t probably a good indication of what you would do at uni so you can’t say for certain if you will be good at it per say.

This is the case for every single degree. Your high school is just meant to be a foundation to learn harder concepts in uni. Like if someone did well in maths in the hsc and got a band 6, there’s no guarantee they are going to excel like that in uni maths where it would be more difficult.

However, the more important thing at your age is to not worry about if it’s going to be hard or not. Every degree will have its own difficulties and some people would be better suited to certain degrees than others. For example, I myself am very good at science and so although my degree would be extremely challenging for an average person, I do well in it because my thought patterns and interest lies in that area. At the same time I wouldn’t probably do as well in a law based degree or something with more essays because I don’t find that enjoyable or interesting

If you are a student who really enjoys the subject and is willing to put in the time and effort sure when you get to uni you can do well in IT. One thing to note though when you get to uni your marks aren’t gonna be everything like if you have a decent mark, experience will be more important. Unless you like plan to do phd or something

I disagree with the Math part. Out of all the HSC subjects, HSC Maths extension 2 and Ext1 are the only ones which give students a head start into first year UNI Mathematics and also buildup the problem solving skills necessary.

And actually I'm finding the Math finals to be MUCH easier than 4u Maths, which was a pleasant surprise.

 

[jazz519]

I disagree with the Math part. Out of all the HSC subjects, HSC Maths extension 2 and Ext1 are the only ones which give students a head start into first year UNI Mathematics and also buildup the problem solving skills necessary.

Yeah I get what you mean with that and I agree it does help with first year maths. I wasn't specific in what I meant but I was referring to like the post because the student above was talking about getting 80s, which would just scrape band 6 in HSC usually. But If you are someone with like a mid to high band 6 then yeah you can make the generalisation you will do well in uni maths

 

[brent012]

If you enjoy IPT and can do well in it, think it's a good sign you might do well in IT. But as others have said "IT" (or more specifically the whole ICT industry) is broad. IPT focusses on just some parts of the industry, there's a lot more. Off the top of my head the popular career paths in ICT or tangentially related include software developer, business analyst, security engineer, configuring servers/machines/networks, data scientist etc.

I'd strongly suggest looking into all of the ICT related careers, by doing stuff like going to open days at various universities, going to events such as Big Day In, and getting involved in competitions/extra curricular stuff like the NCSS Challenge, UNSW ProgComp and so many other programs you would find out about by getting involved in those kind of things.

 

[seremify007]

I’ve posted this before but worth reiterating that the skills/thinking which I learnt in IPT have proven to be extremely useful in my line of work - accounting and finance. Working with financial institutions to meet growing regulatory requirements, the huge focus is on data. Having some understanding of how database schemas work, understanding process flow diagrams, being able to read basic SQL queries, understand concepts such as checksum/error checking/etc, being very logical in building rules/queries, etc... are actually a differentiator between most other “accountants” and myself, and it’s proven to be extremely useful. Sure in practice there’s much newer and more technically deep concepts (e.g. data lakes, warehouses, source of truth, etc), just knowing (and understanding) what these really mean is already a huge step up vs the average person.

That all being said, by the time you’re in my position, maybe everyone will have a similar level of understanding and it won’t be such a special thing but at least for me, I am very appreciative of what I learnt in IPT and how it’s helped me in my career.