The requirements specified on our web pages are a guide to typical entry requirements for all our undergraduate programmes. However we will consider your application on its own merits and the exact nature of your offer could vary, depending on your individual case. Please bear in mind that we are looking for reasons to admit you, not reasons to turn you away.

For all of our programmes, we require the following three criteria:

• a high grade in Mathematics,
• a high grade in a second subject, and/or a high average or overall score and
• a suitable qualification in English Language.

For more information please visit our Entry Requirements page.

Yes – the University holds a number of Open Days throughout the year. You can find out more at our page about University Open Days.

The industrial placement gives you the opportunity to put what you have learnt in to practice in a commercial environment, and provides you with invaluable experience which further enhances your study. This is usually reflected in improved grades towards the end of your study programme. The experience can also enhance your career opportunities on graduate, giving you an advantage in the job market.  You will also earn a salary of at least £15,000.

It may be possible to spend a year studying at a university in North America, Asia or Australia. Your year abroad would replace your corresponding year at York and the marks you attain contribute to the classification of your York degree. This is something you can discuss with your supervisor when you arrive in York.

If you submit an application that meets our entry criteria, you will be invited for interview. You will get a chance to see the University and the Department, as well as meeting academics and current students, so you can get a feel for what studying with us would be like. The day is relaxed and informal, and you will have a 25 minute interview with an academic member of staff.

Visit our How to Apply section for more information about applying for one of our programmes.

You can find out what fees there are and when you should pay them in the page about Fees and Funding.

We offer a number of scholarships every year to the most outstanding UK/EU students entering the Department. All entrants who obtain the following grades will be shortlisted and considered for an award:

• Three A grades at GCE Advanced Level, or
• Three A grades at Scottish Advanced Higher Level , or
• Equivalent grades in any other British or European qualification.

No separate application form is necessary – an internal panel will assess your examination grades, your performance at interview (if appropriate), and any other indicator of your academic or creative excellence.

The University also has a number of bursaries and awards available for new students – you can find out more at the university Fees and Funding page. You may also find the Student 'Money' section of the University website helpful.

Download maps of the campus and how to reach it – York is easily accessible: situated almost halfway between London and Edinburgh, trains from London take under 2 hours; 2½ from Edinburgh. York is also well served by road links, being easily accessible from the A1, M1 and the M62. For more information on how to find us visit our Contact and Maps page.

For those travelling from overseas, there are airports at Leeds/Bradford (with a direct bus transfer to York), Doncaster and Humberside. Manchester International Airport's rail link provides a direct route to York, with a travelling time of just 1½ hours and Heathrow Airport can be reached in just 3½ hours. There are also excellent ferry services from Rotterdam and Zeebrugge to Hull.

The Department is housed in a new purpose-built Computer Science building at the new campus expansion at Heslington East. The new campus is situated approximately ten-fifteen minutes walking distance from the main campus, but there are clear footpaths and a free and frequent bus service for students to move easily between the two campus sites.

The table below shows what we, the Department of Computer Science, provide for our own undergraduate students studying for degrees in Computer Science and Engineering.

(This table does not include the facilities provided for teaching and research staff in the Department of Computer Science.)

All CSE staff and students, including undergraduates, also have access to the facilities of the University of York IT Services. See also the University's Network Access Service (NAS), to which the Department of Computer Science's own network is connected.

The Department of Computer Science Network runs at the following speeds: 100 Mb/s (wire) from user's computer to switching centre; 10 Gb/s (fibre optic) from switching centre to servers.

Room	Hardware available	Software available
Software teaching lab 1 (for all CSE students)	84 computers: Intel I5, 3.2GHz, 8G RAM, 500G hard drive, 22" (560mm) 16:9 LCD monitor, connected to the CS Dept network and servers laser printer / scanning to email	Linux (64-bit) Windows 7 Web browsers Compilers, compiler-writing tools and cross-assemblers for a variety of programming languages, including C, C++, C#, F# Gnat Ada95, Java Haskell, Perl, Python Prolog, Progol Ruby, Scheme Visual Basic Database management systems Spreadsheets Document processors Microsoft Office OpenOffice.org TeX, LaTeX, etc. Document browsers (E)CAD software: Eagle HSpice ModelSim Xilinx Design Suite Word processors, including French German Spanish Project management packages Requirements analysis tools Formal specification tools Theorem provers Testing tools and debuggers Statistics packages: SPSS S-Plus Symbolic Maths packages: Maple Mathematica Matlab
Software teaching lab 2 (for all CSE students)	84 computers: Intel I5, 3.2GHz, 8G RAM, 500G hard drive, 22" (560mm) 16:9 LCD monitor, connected to the CS Dept network and servers laser printer / scanning to email
Software teaching lab 3 (for 4th- year MEng CSE students)	42 computers: Intel I5, 3.2GHz, 8G RAM, 500G hard drive, 22" (560mm) 16:9 LCD monitor, connected to the CS Dept network and servers laser printer / scanning to email
Hardware teaching lab 1 (for all CSE students)	48 lab benches. Each bench: component-level linear electronics kit gate-level digital electronics kit IC-level digital electronics kit signal generator 5 MHz (digital) oscilloscope 60 MHz (digital) real-time experiment kit, based on VIA micro-PC chip-set computer: Intel I5, 3.2GHz, 8G RAM, 500G hard drive, 22" (560mm) 16:9 LCD monitor, connected to the CS Dept network and servers 26 FPGA development boards 12 data-transmission-line experiment kits 12 component illustration boards
Hardware teaching lab 2 (for all CSE students)	The Tony Fisher laboratory 32 lab benches. Each bench: component/IC/system-level computer kit based on Cortex M3 ARM MBED board signal generator 5 MHz (digital) oscilloscope 60 MHz (digital) computer: Intel I5, 3.2GHz, 8G RAM, 500G hard drive, 22" (560mm) 16:9 LCD monitor, connected to the CS Dept network and servers 6 logic analysers (72-channel) 2 digital oscilloscopes 200 MHz (4-channel) 6 EPROM programmers and erasers
Hardware teaching lab 3 (for CSE Embedded Systems and CSE projects)	The Crossrail Laboratory 16 lab benches. Each bench: signal generator 5 MHz (digital) oscilloscope 60 MHz (digital) computer: Intel I5, 3.2GHz, 8G RAM, 500G hard drive, 22" (560mm) 16:9 LCD monitor, connected to the CS Dept network and servers
	Of the 310 computers listed here, 25 have read/write DVD drives.

You do not need to have previously studied Computer Science before you join us at York. The first year lays the foundation for the study of Computer Science, and will help to bring everyone to the same level. If you would like to read some preparatory texts, you can download an Undergraduate Preparatory Reading List.

Our single subject Masters (4 year) programmes are fully accredited by the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) British Computer Society (BCS), and our Bachelors programmes are partially accredited – this means that you will have fulfilled some of the academic requirements to become accredited as a Chartered Engineer.

The first year is common to all of our single-subject programmes (except Computer Science with Business Enterprise Systems), which allows you to transfer between them, so you have as much flexibility as possible.

The number of hours scheduled for lectures, programming classes, laboratory periods and tutorials is between 15 and 20 hours a week. However, much of the required learning is achieved outside the scheduled timetable, and so you will be need to be self-motivated, self-disciplined and willing to learn outside your contact hours. Your personal supervisor will be on hand to guide your studies.

York has a collegiate system of accommodation, and your college is where you are likely to live for your first year at York, but you will remain part of the college community throughout your time at York. Find out more about the colleges at York and why they are the hub of social activities on campus.

The University has many facilities for students, including a sports centre, nursery, shops on campus, health centre and student’s union. Find out more about what the University can offer.

The University of York is largely residential. While you are here, you will find that there is a lot more on offer than lectures and examinations: you will live, eat, sleep, make friends, and take part in many activities - some new to you and some not - in ways that form a parallel life alongside the one you lead in your subject department. The way in which you arrange all this is entirely up to you. Some of it may operate at University level (representing the University in a sport, for example), but most students find that most of it is centred on their college.

The University of York has had a collegiate structure since its foundation in 1963.

Every student, and every member of staff, at the University of York is a member of one of the colleges. Once you join a college, you remain a member (unless you find that you want to change to another). That is, in a sense, you remain a member for life, as you will always receive a welcome in College if you return.

See here for a map of the Heslington site, showing the locations of all colleges.

• Alcuin College - up on the hill behind the Seebohm Rowntree (Health Sciences) building.
• Derwent College - next to Heslington Hall, at the head of the West Lake.
• Goodricke College - recently relocated to our new campus at Heslington East.
• Halifax College - the other side of Heslington Village, but near shops and pubs.
• James College - on the West Lake, backing on to the Sports Centre and the Psychology buildings.
• Langwith College - next down the West Lake from Derwent College.
• Vanbrugh College - between the West Lake and the central Market Square (shops).
• Wentworth Graduate College - opposite James across the West Lake.

Some colleges have outposts dotted around York, most of them quite close to Heslington - such Eden's Court (Derwent) and Fairfax House (Vanbrugh).

You continue to belong to your college, no matter where you live: in college, or in one of its outposts, or in any other accommodation that you may find in York. A college is a group of people first, and a group of buildings second.

The University has recently begun a large expansion on a new site called Heslington East - adjacent to the current West site, but the other side of Heslington village. This will include an East Lake, and new department buildings that will include a new building for Computer Science to be occupied by autumn 2010; but it will also include new colleges. Goodricke College has just moved to its new site; soon, Langwith College will also move, and that will enable Derwent College to expand in its existing location. In the longer term, some new colleges will be established in Heslington East.

The colleges at York operate as social groups, in which staff and graduate students and undergraduate students can meet, get to know one another, and take part in communal and inter-collegiate activities.

How you use your College - what you put into it and what you get out of it - is up to you. For some students it is, more than their department, the centre of their existence. It is the place where they meet, eat, work, watch television, and sleep. For others, it is just some or none of these. All students are different. Colleges try to cater for student differences.

From the point of view of an undergraduate student, perhaps the most important point is that your college provides a student support service that is independent of the University and of your department - so, if you are having problems with your department, and you do not wish to involve the University, you can approach your college knowing that your problem will be treated with sympathy and in confidence.

The colleges vary slightly in their organisation; but, generally, in the first instance, there will be a small team of graduate students who act as College Tutors - to whom you can talk about your problem and discuss the best way of dealing with it. In some colleges, each Tutor has responsibility for a particular court or pair of courts.

There will be a Provost, and a Dean, both of whom are a members of the academic staff. The Dean is responsible for college discipline. The College Tutors or the Dean (as you wish) will mediate in the conflicts of interest that tend to arise when people share living space.

Each college is led by its Provost, and he or she represents the college in the interests of all its members.

The colleges vary in size, both in membership and in buildings. With the exception of Wentworth Graduate College, each college has about 900 Junior Members (undergraduate students), 60 Graduate Members (postgraduate students) and 160 Senior Members (academic staff, and administrative and support staff). For more on this, see 'common rooms', below. There are no single-sex colleges, although some colleges do contain some single-sex accommodation for those who prefer it.

When you apply for admission to the University, you can express a preference for a particular college. If you do not do so, you will be allocated to a college at random. Each college contains students and staff from all departments, and you will find that the students who are following the same academic programme as you include members of all colleges.

The college buildings are known mainly as Courts, or in a few cases as Houses or Blocks, depending on their shape. (At some other universities, these may be known variously as houses or blocks or courts or courtyards or quadrangles or quads.)

As an example, here is a map of Halifax College.

Halifax College is near Heslington village, and is about ten minutes' walk from the Central Hall. It consists of student houses grouped around courtyards, ranging from 6 to 12 students per house, and accommodates 710 students in single study-bedrooms with washbasins and telephone facilities. Typically, each house has a shared kitchen/amenity area and a bathroom, and each pair or rooms shares a shower. A student centre has a cafe/bar/common-room/meeting room, a small shop, telephones, a laundry and vending machines, and a computing room.

In some cases, the college buildings will incorporate the tutorial rooms of one or two non-laboratory departments (History, or Mathematics, for example). A large non-laboratory department might have a separate building within the college grounds (as Economics within Alcuin, for example). There may be seminar rooms and lecture rooms, large and small, within a college and its associated buildings. But that does not affect the membership of the College itself: each college has members undertaking courses in all departments; and, whatever subject you are studying, when you attend a lecture, that lecture could be located anywhere within the University.

Accommodation

All colleges provide accommodation.

Catering and bars

Every college has a snack bar. In addition, Derwent and Goodricke have dining rooms, while Alcuin, Halifax, James and Vanbrugh have brasseries. Every college has a bar.

Common rooms

All colleges have common rooms: generally, a Junior Common Room (JCR), Graduate Common Room (GCR) and Senior Common Room (SCR).

James College has a JCR only: its graduate and senior members use the GCR and SCR of Wentworth Graduate College.

Undergraduate libraries

Each college used to have its own undergraduate library; but now there is just a single Inter-Collegiate Undergraduate Library, situated in Langwith College.

Economies of this kind, which involve the relocation rather than the removal of facilities, are made in order to keep costs down: for your benefit.

Cleaning and heating

All colleges provide basic services (room cleaning, heating, etc.), and have facilities for students to wash and dry their own clothes and bedlinen.

Self-catering

All colleges provide self-catering, to varying extents (see next).

The colleges at York provide more than do 'halls of residence', but certainly less than do colleges in the more traditional sense: they are not charitable bodies owning their own land and buildings, they are not involved in the admission of students to the University, and they do not undertake academic supervision - although they are indeed involved in the pastoral care of students.

The facilities that they provide have changed over time, not only in line with changes to the economy and to the level of support that universities and students receive, but also in response to the changing expectations and requirements that students place upon them.

• As one example, there is now much more demand for self-catering, and very little for central dining rooms. (Dining rooms are necessary mainly for the conference trade - which helps to pay for the facilities that are provided for students, and so keeps prices down.) Consequently, recent student accommodation has been designed with a kitchen/dining-room for each cluster of student rooms, and there is a supermarket centrally placed in the main site of the University.

  If you prefer not to shop and cook your own food, you can eat anywhere - the original scheme of each college having a dining room serving the same kind of food as every other has been replaced by a variety of cafes, brasseries, snack bars and so on, each serving a very different kind of food in a different atmosphere. This might be seen as going against the traditional collegiate ideal, but there is no doubt that it is what the students want - and you, the customers, must determine what the colleges provide.

• As another example, there is a variety of family accommodation, of many sizes. At Halifax College, for instance, McHugh Court is composed entirely of family houses.

The original ideal of staff-student social contact still exists in a few of the colleges; but declining staff involvement, pressures on college space, and pressures on staff time have all meant that, realistically, the colleges at York are now becoming nearer to halls of residence. They do, though, have very good in-house social facilities and an essential and valued role in student support. Certainly, they retain a strong sense of identity and social cohesion: an indication of that is that students are described by their college, rather than by their department, when they are identified in student-produced journalism. That identity arises largely because you retain membership of your College even though you may live in different kinds of accommodation, in different places, from year to year.

See also

• the University of York page about colleges
• the UoY Accommodation Office page about colleges.

Finally, did you know that many universities around the world - in at least sixteen countries - are collegiate?

See here for

• an international discussion of colleges, and
• a list of links to college web pages around the world.

• The City of York lies almost exactly half way between London (the capital of England) and Edinburgh (the capital of Scotland).

• York is located very close to the motorway (M1/A1) that runs between those two cities, and also lies directly on the main railway line that joins them.

  London (King's Cross station) is one hour and fifty minutes from York by train.

• York is at latitude 53.948 N, longitude 1.0514 W.

• York is said to be in northern England; but notice that England is only part of Britain, and that Scotland lies further to its north.

  York is less than 40% of the way up mainland Britain as a whole: it is 350 km North of the southern coast of England, but 550 km South of the northern coast of Scotland.

• For maps and travel information, see how to reach the Department of Computer Science and, more generally, how to reach the University of York.

The population of York is 200,000. Its area is 280 square kilometres.

• The city of York was founded in the year 71 CE (71 AD). Called Eburacum, it was the capital of the Roman province of Further Britannia, which extended as far north as Newcastle.

• Although of Roman origin, York is probably the best-preserved mediaeval city in northern Europe. It has had formal local government and independence as a 'borough' since 1369.

• The city walls are mediaeval, but they follow the Roman legionary HQ defences in some places. (They enclose a much larger area; also, the ground level had risen by several metres in the intervening thousand years.) The walls form an almost complete ring, 4.5km in length, and you can walk round the city centre on top of them.

• York was an important centre of intellectual activity during the scientific revolution of the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries, especially in archaeology, architecture, astronomy, geology and medicine. The British Association for the Advancement of Science was inaugurated in York in 1831.

• Are you a history buff? York has many legal and historical peculiarities. From the Middle Ages up until the late 19th century, only two British cities had a 'Lord Mayor': they were London and York; and the Members of Parliament for London and for York had special privileges in the House of Commons. Guy Fawkes, who tried to blow up Parliament, was born and educated in York (but not at the University). For much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, books could be printed (legally) in England only in London, Oxford, Cambridge and York. Dick Turpin, the famous highwayman, did indeed flee from London to York, but it is a myth that he made the journey in a day; in York, you can visit his grave.

  As the historic capital of northern England, York is a much more varied and interesting city than might be expected considering its relatively small size.

• In the City centre, you will find everything from mediaeval guild halls to modern department stores, bookshops, small specialist shops, and cafes. There are shops selling computers and other electronic equipment, clothes, sportsgear and sports equipment. There are food shops that specialise in the foods of various countries around the world. Every day, there is a market with traditional open-air market stalls; at one of these, you can get your mobile phone (cellphone) repaired or customised while you wait.

• There are many museums, including the largest railway museum in the world. And also a railway station that was the largest in Europe at the time it was built in 1877.

  And, while we are on about 'large', there is York Minster: it is the largest mediaeval gothic cathedral north of the Alps. Not only is it a beautiful building, but, at the 71-metre-high central tower, you can stand underneath 16000 tonnes of masonry erected by mediaeval craftsmen not one of whom had a degree in structural engineering.

• York also has an incredible number of restaurants, coffee shops and fast-food outlets. That is perhaps not surprising, as it receives more tourists than any other city in England apart from London (which has fifty times its population).

• For more information, see

    |   This is York   |   Visit York   |   What's on York.   |   York City Council   |   Yorkshire Tourist Board   |  

• The British Isles is a geographical expression, encompassing all the many islands, large and small, that make up the two nations (1) the U.K. and (2) the Irish Republic.

• The U.K. is the 'United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland'. It is a single nation in the sense that it is, for example, a member of the United Nations. Its population is just over 60 million.

• Britain comprises the countries of England, Scotland and Wales; it forms the greater part of the U.K.

  It is sometimes called 'Great Britain', to emphasise that it contains more than just England: it includes Scotland (to the north) and Wales (to the west) as well.

• England is a country which forms the largest part of Britain. It has a population of just over 50 million.

  England is divided into counties. If English is not your native language, be careful not to confuse the words 'country' and 'county'.

• Yorkshire is the largest county in England.

  For administrative purposes, Yorkshire is divided into North, South, East and West Yorkshire. The City of York is fairly central, but it is (just) in North Yorkshire.

  If you read about Yorkshire in books, or in material dating from before the mid-1970s, you will see that Yorkshire used to be divided into the North, East and West Ridings ('thirdings'); these are no longer used. York was at their common centre.

• The City of York is the historic capital of the whole of Yorkshire, and also of the North of England.

More of our graduates gain professional, managerial and technical employment on graduation than any other UK higher education Computer Science programmes. Find out more about the types of jobs our graduates get on our Destinations of Computer Science Graduates page.