Offer received: UNSW Gateway, BIS / BCompSc

#What Gateway actually is

UNSW Gateway is an admissions pathway for students at participating schools. The short version: it recognises that an ATAR is one number measured under one set of conditions, and it gives students from those schools an adjusted entry pathway plus support in the run-up to university — academic workshops, campus days, and a clearer line of sight into the degree itself.

Being accepted doesn't mean the HSC stops mattering. It means the pathway into BIS / BCompSc is defined now, in Term 3 of Year 12, instead of being decided in a single week of December offers.

#Why this degree

The double degree is the reason I picked UNSW in the first place. Information Systems is the half that asks what a system is for — the data model, the process, the people using it. Computer Science is the half that asks how it actually gets built, and how it breaks.

Every project on this site has been sitting on one side of that split or the other:

• Normalising 500,000 rows of e-commerce data to 3NF and wiring it into a live dashboard — that is Information Systems.
• Building an offline PWA with hashed local auth, sanitised input and a service-worker cache — that is Computer Science.
• Pulling apart the 2022 Optus breach — an unauthenticated public API and an IDOR flaw that leaked 9.8M records — is the answer to both at once, which is where I want to end up: cybersecurity management and security engineering.

#What changes now

Not much, honestly, and that is the point. Trials are done, the HSC is close, and the Software Engineering major work still has to be finished properly. Gateway removes a variable; it doesn't remove the work.

What it does change is the horizon. Everything on this portfolio — the Ops Lab, the Packet Tracer network, the threat model, six years of cadets ending in a company command — was built pointed at a destination that was, until now, a hopeful line in a fastfetch block. It reads a little differently today.

#Thanks

To my teachers, to the cadet staff who handed a 15-year-old a section and let him work it out, and to my family. None of this is a solo run.

// TARGET: UNSW BIS / BCompSc — ETA 2027  [ LOCKED ]