Study Computational Modelling at Otago

Stephanie Glover:

Hi, my name is Stephanie, and I did computer modeling last year. I decided to take it because I’m a post-grad science student, and I know that society as a whole is moving more and more into technology. I wanted to be able to understand computer modeling because so many science subjects, and even other subjects, involve computer modeling.

Computer modeling really gave me a basic understanding, and I can go into the future understanding all the computer models. Like all the COVID computer models—I looked at them, I was like, hey, I get it! I know what it means to flatten the line now.

Otago, in particular, is a great university. It is not like any other university in New Zealand because every student lives in the exact same suburb, and it’s super social, super open and welcoming, and has super great teachers.

Professor David Bryant:

Well, hello, my name’s David Bryant. I’m a professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. Now, I’m in charge of the Computational Modelling programme, and computational modelling—as a programme, it’s not one that people know a lot about often outside the university, but it does a really key thing, and I can say that especially now.

So now it’s, um, the beginning of June or so, and we’re just coming off alert level 2 of COVID, and we’ve been through a lockdown for the last four months. I don’t think there’s ever been a time when it’s been so obvious how important mathematical modelling has been, and how important computational modelling is—both in deciding what we’re going to do, what’s going to happen, what should we do, but also in the way models are used and sometimes misused. They’re powerful, but they can be dangerous.

Now, the Computational Modelling programme is about teaching about models and constructing models. I mean, in any degree in science, even in Commerce, or occasionally even Arts, you’ll be working with models and learning about models. What we’re doing is we’re teaching you how to construct the models you’ll need, how to compute with them, and how to sort of create models where models really haven’t existed before.

The University of Otago is really one of the only places that specialises in computational modelling as a degree programme. We have several degrees—you can do a BSc solely in Computational Modelling, and that sort of specialises in the techniques and a lot of the mathematics and so on that you build onto it.

But a lot of people—and I really encourage all of the students to do this—a lot of people come and they’ll just take a few Computational Modelling papers as part of their degree. Now, we have a minor that’s specially set up to hit the most important aspects of Computational Modelling, from a first-year kind of introduction to a second-year, more technical introduction to the maths, modelling, and so on, and some other papers that sort of build on that. You can take a Computational Modelling minor together with almost any other science degree and even some other degrees.

Now, where it hits in terms of career—well, Computational Modelling itself is not a sort of well-recognised discipline and that's because modelling is really everywhere. What it gives you is the power to take the theory and the ideas that you’ve had in your university studies and just learn how to apply them in new situations.

You’re given a rough, unformed problem—we kind of teach you how to formulate that until you get it into the kind of standard maths problem or computing problem that you might have tackled during your degree.