Blog Post #3 – What I Learned February 28th, 2024
What a course! It is both exciting to finally get to this point in the program so close to graduation, while simultaneously being a reminder of my ever-present imposter syndrome in this career field. I’m certainly not the first or only person with these thoughts, and I certainly won’t be the last, but going through this course has eased those fears, albeit ever so slightly. Group projects are usually a drag, especially in online courses. I have had both great groups, and we’ll say “less than ideal” groups in this program. I was lucky for Capstone to have one of the former. Each person of the team was communicative, productive, and helpful. When one of us was struggling, someone was there to help. It reminded me that although I don’t know as much as I would like about the world of software engineering, it’s alright. There will always be others, whether on your team, in your workplace, or friends in the industry that can help you and encourage you to grow and learn. If there was a success for me in this course, it was that realization. It helped ease fears that I was not ready to graduate, and subsequently enter the field.
Unfortunately, or fortunately, we did not do much actual coding for this class, as our project was aimed at exclusively AI tools to build a web app. We relied heavily, on purpose, on AI to essentially do our work for us, documenting our experience and usage along the way. For that reason, there were not many technical successes I experienced this term, and showed that my success was a psychological one.
Overall though, it was a very informative class in many ways, even from the explorations, and I feel more prepared than I did at the start of class to graduate. I have benefited greatly from both the explorations that give great advice, as well as from my fellow classmates, especially those in my group. Even though we had to use AI to create our app, it still required a lot of time and effort to create, and I can see myself utilizing some of the tools we researched in the future to not replace coding, but to help enhance and further both my own learning and production. We are entering an interesting time in computer science and it is a good thing that we be familiar with and learn to work with new and improving tools and technology.
