For my first blog post I will be explaining my thoughts on the Online Capstone Project course so far and the project selection process. To be honest, I have been dreading taking this class for a long time. Over the past two years I have learned many skills in many varied subjects. Now is the time to combine and effectively utilize the abilities I have gained in order to contribute to the group project. After learning so much in such a short time, my main worry is that I may have forgotten too much, and that could become a problem when the project really gets going.
I don’t want to give you the wrong idea. My experience in the first week has actually been very positive. I found two group members with similar goals, and we were able to come up with a project idea rankings list and team standards policy very easily. So far so good, right? Indeed, I consider myself lucky that I found compatible teammates and that we are getting along quite well.
Prior to coming to OSU I previously went to medical school, which had a similar structure of learning a lot of material in the first two years. Considering that I am nearing the end of my second year in this program, I want to avoid repeating the same mistakes and bad experiences of my time in med school. Basically, each course back then would involve (temporarily) learning an insane amount of medical facts and information over the course of a month or two, hopefully remembering everything for the big exam, and then immediately forgetting it all after the exam’s over. Then it was on to the next class. This sort of binge and purge educational process is absolutely not my preferred learning style. At the midpoint of med school I felt like I had learned a lot without actually retaining anything. Even so, it took me way too long to realize that medicine was not the right path for me, and that I should switch to something that better fits my interests and personality.
I feel like I have mostly avoided the same situation in my computer science education since the courses have been more skill-based than fact-based. I have mostly retained what I have learned because I learn better by doing rather than by memorizing. However, after reading the descriptions of the available projects I am concerned that I have become rusty or out of practice in some subjects that will be required. For example, I enjoyed the web design and database classes when I took them a year ago, but I haven’t had use that knowledge much in the past year. Will I be able to relearn everything I need to without falling behind? This thought has been in the back of my mind for a while, but recently I have been trying to change my attitude. Rather than worrying, I should see this as an opportunity to review my work from the past two years and apply what I have learned to creating something new.
With so many interesting project ideas available on the Project Portal, it was hard for my team to narrow them down to just six choices. I figured the best approach would be to select concepts that expand upon material from my favorite courses. For instance, our top four choices would utilize techniques we learned in CS 290 – Web Development:
- Crowd-Sourced Travel Planner
- Crowd-sourced Fitness Challenge App
- Dating app for animal adoption
- Cross Platform Discussion App
Each of these would involve creating a functional user-facing website a substantial backend process or some sort of persistent storage. I would like to get more practice in both web design as well as implementing backend systems/databases. Similarly, our other two choices are related to CS 370 – Introduction to Security:
5. Website Security Research Project
6. Malware Analysis
I am partial to #5, as I quite enjoyed the Damn Vulnerable Web Application (DVWA) assignment in CS 370. It was fun to put myself in the role of a hacker and try to break the security on a website, and it would be an interesting challenge to produce a similar site for security researchers to use. Both of these project ideas would involve developing safe, contained systems for users to experiment with malware or other malicious code.
Overall, my team is off to a good start. I am looking forward to being assigned a project and getting started.
