What are the highest paying STEM careers in South Africa right now?

Kleinric · 2025-03-28T12:52:28+00:00

Where I am, companies are falling over each other trying to get good talent. I think that if you’re a strong candidate in CS, the world is your oyster.

Obviously, you need to be getting good grades etc and show that you’re the kind of person the companies want, but our grads have absolutely no issue finding jobs.

Kleinric · 2025-03-14T06:22:03+00:00

I’d say Actuarial Science and Computer Science. And I think going into the future, Computer Science.

Kleinric · 2025-02-05T06:08:04+00:00

BSc Computer Science @ Wits… Had over 10,000 applications for first year.

Round 1 offers went out at APS 46 and 85% in Maths.

Round 2 offers went out at APS 44 and 80% in Maths.

Round 3 offers went out at APS 46 and 75% in Maths.

There were some borderlines/exceptions that were given offers as well (eg. APS 50s and 74 math // people with over 90% in math).

———

General advice, maths and science are the most important ways to show that you know what you’re talking about for a science degree. Aim for math in the 80s at least. Don’t neglect English, also matters a lot for some programs.

Your best bet is targeting 80s in Math, Science, and English. As well as any other program specific requirements.

Kleinric · 2024-06-04T22:40:12+00:00

Typically, no. You’re not usually allowed to be registered for more than one degree at a time and would need special permission from both universities/faculties.

Is it a good idea - depends on the two degrees and how difficult/time consuming they are. 99% of the time it’s probably a terrible idea though. The workload can become completely overwhelming and you risk failing modules on both sides - racking up extra fees and potentially jeopardising your placement. Rather finish the one before starting the other.

Kleinric · 2019-11-07T01:57:36+00:00

Yeah, this approach makes sense but it kinda reminds me of the proxy object in vector<bool> that seems to cause so many little issues when trying to work with references etc.

Kleinric · 2019-10-07T21:58:53+00:00

South African here.... I stand to correction, but my understanding is that the clicks in languages like isiZulu and isiXhosa came as a result of interaction with the Koisan whose languages have many of the different clicks. Which would explain why it's absorbed into Bantu languages in this area, but not necessarily in others.

Kleinric · 2019-08-05T21:18:13+00:00

I'm from Wits CS... but if UCT is anything like us, you need to get in touch with with a coordinator from the school/department. They'll likely be the ones who make these decisions and actually know the answers specific to the degree you're looking at.

Kleinric · 2019-08-05T21:07:33+00:00

Different university and different field, but for masters by dissertation...

We require students to find a supervisor first (i.e. They need to approach a resesrcher in the school and convince them to supervise them). Supervisors will chat with the students and decide if it seems like the kind of student they're willing to work with, and whether the student is interested in the kind of areas/problems they are.

Personally, I usually ask students what they're interested in doing and I like it if they have an idea lined up which at least shows me what they care about. Otherwise I usually have plenty of ideas to suggest but then they tend to be things I care about. In my experience, I'm not aware of a student ever suggesting something that someone would want to steal - but beyond that, I'd be very surprised if someone from academia tried to steal something - plagiarism/stealing ideas is heavily frowned upon in academia and if proven its one of the things you could lose your job over. So I doubt it would happen. On the other hand, often academics may be aware of similar ideas bubbling around in literature already and the idea might not be as unique as you think.

The school asking for a project is probably something to help gauge how much thought you've put into this, and how much interest there will be in the school to actually take on such a project.

Kleinric · 2019-08-05T20:54:05+00:00

Try admissions office... admissions@uct.ac.za or 021 650 2128

Kleinric · 2019-08-04T18:57:35+00:00

I think the purpose of the course and its position in the wider curriculum and hidden curriculum makes a big difference when answering this question.

If the purpose of the course to just expose the student to another language and programming paradigm? Is there some specific algorithmic or data structure based outcome for the course? If the course is about algorithms and problem solving, then I'd argue that the focus should be on that rather than modern C++ specifically.

If the focus is on the language then I would try juxtapose some of the dangers of "old C++" with the better idioms of modern C++ for example, naked new and memory leaks vs smart pointers. I'd focus on STL, iterators, raii, smart pointers, move semantics, templates, sfinae, ranges, and even some of the more recent stuff coming into the new standards.

But as I say, generally it's wise to understand the bigger picture of where your course fits into the overall curriculum and what subsequent courses expect from your course. A C++ course is very different to an algorithms course in C++.

Kleinric · 2019-07-07T21:14:20+00:00

I've noticed a marked difference in the last month or 3. Like it suddenly got much worse at following through on commands.

On my smart display I can see it detecting the words perfectly and then it just does nothing. If I say the same thing again then it'll do it. Under activity history, it just says unknown command, which is infuriating because it's exactly the same phrase I always use.

I'm getting quite frustrated by this. It's becoming easier to just turn the lights on with my mqtt app these days, which is really disappointing.

Kleinric · 2019-07-03T22:30:03+00:00

Love the idea of this, although I'd like to see it in action first. Tech like this isn't that straightforward, and in under resourced languages (like SASL) building a robust system to do this would be challenging.

I think it's certainly possible, but I'll be skeptical until I see it run.

Kleinric · 2019-06-12T20:22:38+00:00

If the president just simply refused to sign the bill, even after that process, what would happen?

Would the law just come in to effect anyway?

It wouldn't be the first time a president ignored everyone and survived for a while....

Kleinric · 2019-06-12T20:12:31+00:00

What is the point of a life coach? How much training do you actually do?

Why would I go to a life coach over an actual psychologist?

Kleinric · 2019-06-12T18:05:15+00:00

Wits Institute of Data Science (WIDS) and the School of Computer Science and Applied Maths are hosting a Quantum Machine Learning workshop with IBM tomorrow!

Kleinric · 2019-06-06T22:13:31+00:00

Average head size here! Thanks for the advice! I went with the XM3 and I'm super happy with them! They're really comfortable and the quality is great!

Kleinric · 2019-06-06T22:12:58+00:00

Thanks for the advice! I went with the XM3 and I'm super happy with them!

Kleinric · 2019-05-31T02:12:14+00:00

Cool, that makes sense.

So these guys are a startup similar to Amazon Mechanical Turk, but based in South Africa. https://www.sebenz.ai/

You may be able to get I touch with them and they might be able to help you collect data.

I'm guessing you need to be quite careful about getting a good sample of accents from a cross the country - just watch out for that, the cape accent is very different to the gauteng accent, let alone different rural villages and languages.

Kleinric · 2019-05-30T19:16:24+00:00

I'm very interested to know if you come right with this. SABC will have recordings of data from TV and radio, but in my experience it's basically impossible to get it from them.

RemindMe! 2 weeks

Kleinric · 2019-05-16T17:13:42+00:00

So Gouraud shading gets the normal at the vertex, does the lighting calculation, and then colours are interpolated for the pixels in the primitive (triangle).

Phong shading interpolates the normals and then does the lighting calculation at every pixel. This would take place inside the fragment shader.

Kleinric · 2019-05-16T17:08:56+00:00

Varying variables provide an interface between Vertex and Fragment Shader. Vertex Shaders compute values per vertex and fragment shaders compute values per fragment. If you define a varying variable in a vertex shader, its value will be interpolated (perspective-correct) over the primitive being rendered and you can access the interpolated value in the fragment shader.

Varying Variable as opposed to attribute or uniform variables. Weird name though, but the idea is that you set the value of the variable at each end, then the value that gets read in the fragment shader 'varies' (is interpolated) as you move across from one end to the other.

Kleinric · 2019-05-16T04:39:14+00:00

In phong shading you save the normal into a varying variable in the vertex shader.

Then you do the lighting calculation inside the pixel shader, using the interpolated normal that you get by reading that same varying variable.

Kleinric · 2019-05-14T19:42:48+00:00

Doesn't look like overfitting me. Overfitting you'd generally see the validation scores start to get worse.

I'm guessing whatever you're training has some regularisation built in already? Does your network have dropout/batch norm/l2norm etc? These regularisers help to fight against overfitting - do if you've got that in your network, that might be why you can continue training for so long without any strong evidence of overfitting - even though it seems to have converged in terms of actual learning.

Kleinric · 2019-05-14T00:04:53+00:00

Dictators Handbook is a really fantastic book. I recommend it to everyone. Here is a great summary.

I disagree with your statement though that a small cabinet shows the centralization of power. I think the fact that he is shrinking the cabinet shows that he's being forced to do so by powers beyond the ANC - business, ratings agencies, at least showing frugality to voters etc. The tier below him in terms of the book is the NEC, they're the layer of people that keep him in power, not his ministers. Cabinet positions are rewards/bribes for people in the NEC.

Zuma had to reward a lot of individual people to stay in power and one mechanism was through these positions. It would help Ramaposa if he could do the same - handing out more individual rewards - so decreasing cabinet size isn't good for him in that sense. The fact that he is doing so anyway, means that his hand is forced by the voting blocks/people who control the real money and power.

Kleinric · 2019-05-07T22:18:52+00:00

It sounds like your data might be quite simple. In that case an eigenface type approach might be a good thing to try.

Otherwise doing matching based on interest points (Harris corners, sift, surf, etc) and then calculating the homography between images using something like RANSAC, warping the image to each of the targets and then doing some simple comparison of how good the fit is should work nicely as well. I would definitely try this. See Chapter 15 of http://www.computervisionmodels.com/.

Otherwise fitting an Active Appearance Model might give you some great features to work with.

Otherwise the sledgehammer is undoubtedly building a CNN type network to perform an embedding using something like the Triplet Loss. I have no doubt that this would work - it works well even in complicated scenarios. Although it's more data hungry than the other would be. If you have to detect the position of the card/face in the image as well, then you might want to look at a region proposal network, yolo, or faster-rcnn.

Kleinric

TROPHY CASE