Student Blog

BSc (Hons) Business Information Technology student Zayn Mehrali is in his final year of the course.

He recently took part in a poster event for final-year computing students, during which students had the opportunity to showcase their projects and get feedback from academics to help them progress their ideas. In his guest blog, he talks about his student experience and the poster event.

How has your university experience been?

I chose this degree as my favourite subjects during my A-Levels were business studies and computer science, so I thought why not combine them and choose Business Information Technology (this course is no longer running but you can view our full range of computing courses here).

I chose BU to experience living by myself and become more independent, but also the beach was a very attractive bonus!

I can happily say that over my 2 and ¼ years it really has been a 50/50 split between the two subjects. Before starting this course I did have a moderate amount of experience in programming, however, all of the lecturers in my first year did an excellent job of explaining everything as if we were all new.

I knew many people in my first year who didn’t have any programming experience and still went on to do very well. My favourite unit this year has probably got to be Data Mining as I have learned about and practically used many of the techniques which run under the hood of various systems we use today e.g. Amazon.

You recently took part in a poster event. How did you find it?

When I first arrived at the venue I was slightly overwhelmed by the number of students and academics, but once I had found a place to set up my poster my nerves disappeared! Before this event I didn’t actually have a narrowed down project idea, all I knew was that my project would be about IT Enabled Urban Waste Management.

During the event various members of staff and academics walked around and asked about my project, it was great to get feedback and ideas coming from different technology backgrounds. Some of the ideas that were suggested were to: focus on the management of industrial plastics along the beach, ways that technology can be used to make the collection routes of large waste bins more efficient and reduce co2 emissions, or create an app where the public can report sightings of industrial waste (just to name a few).

This event helped me to shape my idea. I will now be looking into how technology can be used to monitor the large waste bins on Bournemouth beach (AKA smart bins) and how they could communicate with the BCP Council.

What do you plan to do once you graduate?

In the future I plan to become a Business Analyst and this course directly relates to that. IT is playing a huge role in todays society with emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence or 5G, and this course has prepared me to deal with these in my future job.