UTS to USYD. (1 Viewer)

[thenotorious_ky]

Is it possible to transfer UTS engineering to USYD engineering courses? Anyone has any info?

 

[Drdusk]

There is but iirc going from a Non GO8 to a GO8 means less courses will be able to be transferred as opposed to if you were doing it the other way around. So you probably will have to redo some courses..

 

[brent012]

You can, but as DrDusk said, course credit might be a bit harder than if you had transferred from a Go8.

If you intend on going to Usyd eventually, I'd exhaust/consider all of the options at Usyd/UNSW and if you do end up at UTS try to find other people that have transferred to Usyd and/or talk to Usyd so you can pick your courses to minimise subjects you need to retake.

 

[thenotorious_ky]

You can, but as DrDusk said, course credit might be a bit harder than if you had transferred from a Go8.

If you intend on going to Usyd eventually, I'd exhaust/consider all of the options at Usyd/UNSW and if you do end up at UTS try to find other people that have transferred to Usyd and/or talk to Usyd so you can pick your courses to minimise subjects you need to retake.

so as long as I pick same subjects from UTS as USYD, i should be fine ?

 

[brent012]

so as long as I pick same subjects from UTS as USYD, i should be fine ?

No, that would likely be the case at UNSW <-> USYD and probably for UNSW/USYD -> UTS, but not guaranteed for UTS -> USYD/UNSW. You would have to find out what courses you could get credit for by talking to previous students or the Usyd faculty.

Some courses might not have an equivalent at the other uni, will only be accepted as an elective etc. Other courses may either cover different (possibly less, maybe just different) content or be structured differently at UTS compared to UNSW/USYD which makes them incompatible (e.g. UTS has a single physics course compared to UNSW's two, UTS mixed micro and macro economics across two subjects while UNSW/USYD teach them separetely in two subjects).

 

[Drdusk]

Just to give an example of why this happens. If we compared the Intro to Programming course for Comp sci at UNSW vs UTS there is a stark difference. What UTS teaches in a whole term is taught within the first 4/5 weeks in UNSW so now you see why there's an issue with transferring credit as usually unis which are GO8 tend to have 'harder' courses.

 

[brent012]

Just to give an example of why this happens. If we compared the Intro to Programming course for Comp sci at UNSW vs UTS there is a stark difference. What UTS teaches in a whole term is taught within the first 4/5 weeks in UNSW so now you see why there's an issue with transferring credit as usually unis which are GO8 tend to have 'harder' courses.

It's actually a bit more complicated than that and is a good example of what I mean by "different". The introductory programming subject at UNSW uses C, a procedural programming language, where as UTS uses Java which is an object oriented language. It just so happens that the UTS subject (or at least it did in ~2012) takes an "objects first" approach where there is a strong focus on object orientation.

At UNSW, with C they can instead focus on memory management and on introducing some basic data structures/algorithms. A later subject on object orientation will follow with Java once students have learnt C and programming pretty well. At UTS on the other hand, students will learn about memory management and data structures in either a dedicated data structures course or (in the case of the defunct ICT Engineering program) in low level embedded C programming courses.

Note that the introductory C subject at UNSW can't take the place of a proper data structures and algorithms course, and the introductory Java subject at UTS can't take the place of a more detailed design/architecture course covering design patterns etc. so I think both approaches have their pros and cons. The UTS Java approach was certainly very popular over the last 20 or so years (see https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/12/29/the-perils-of-javaschools-2/) but these days I think there's a shift towards intro Python courses where you don't have to teach either OO or memory management/the warts of C.

 

[thenotorious_ky]

It's actually a bit more complicated than that and is a good example of what I mean by "different". The introductory programming subject at UNSW uses C, a procedural programming language, where as UTS uses Java which is an object oriented language. It just so happens that the UTS subject (or at least it did in ~2012) takes an "objects first" approach where there is a strong focus on object orientation.



so what's the only way in order to transfer to usyd? so they dont even look at yr GPA thing?

 

[brent012]

so what's the only way in order to transfer to usyd?

You can still transfer, the UTS subjects still count towards your UTS GPA/transcript that you can use to transfer to Usyd.

Just don't expect to be able to transfer without interruptions to your study schedule, in the worst case scenario you may be up to a year behind if you can't get much credit OR run into weird prereq problems. Courses at all unis change at times, and I don't think cross institution transfers are an exact science necessarily - so you'd either need to find the right people to ask if you want to tailor your study plans around that.

Another alternative might be taking something like science at Usyd where you can take equivalent or actual courses and try to transfer internally. University can be hard though, even some people with mid/high 90s ATARs can struggle in engineering - whether that be due to motivation, dificulty or culture shock. If you take a sidechannel approach like that, you'd want to be pretty confident you can transfer in.

If you start at UTS/MQ/WSU, you might either find that you like it there or have a decent fallback should you not be able to get the marks to transfer. From my understanding however, majority of the people who are capable of graduating engineering are probably also capable of transferring into UNSW/USYD due to the favourable conversion of WAM -> ATAR and Engineering having a reasonable cutoff.