Hello all! I’ll just be giving a general overview of my experience with my Capstone class at Oregon State.
I think my biggest breakthrough was truly understanding a giant code base that was passed to us from our team sponsor that was made by a previous team. It included several python libraries I’d never heard of before and therefore had to spend considerable time familiarizing myself with new tech even though it was in a language I’m already quite comfortable in. It also involved understanding lots of new stock market terminology and really Stockmarket analysis terminology like what backtesting and optimization was and where it fit into how to analyze the algorithms out sponsor wanted us to analyze. So In essence the educating myself on a large codebase which included new technologies was my biggest breakthrough and I think it’ll help me tremendously once I enter the job market since that’s something that’s common in the working world even though we get scant experience with it in school.
I think the courses main strength were the teamwork involved and having to use all the tools that we’ve learned during our degree program such as Git, GitHub, different programming languages and a task management system. It really did a good job at simulating what I believe a real work environment would be like. In terms of weaknesses I think in our particular case because we had a sponsored project, I think he almost gave us too much freedom as to get the results he wanted and we had some difficulties understanding exactly what he wanted. I think having clearer expectations for sponsored projects like the others that are available.
I think there’s some opportunities to make the course better by instead of having blog posts and discussions on certain topics, adding an interview preparation section. Like having students do Leetcode like problems on top of working on the project or even better having students do and film a mach interview which includes solving a difficult Leetcode problem. I think that’s what would make this class better is on top of helping expand my portfolio, it would be of great help if it could properly prepare me for intense coding interviews that are conducted at top companies. When it comes to threats to the course, I think if it doesn’t evolve with the times like adding what I just mentioned it would make it somewhat obsolete even though we get to work on a big project but we also get to work on big projects in other classes. So really focusing on the interview and getting into a top company should be the focus plus the working on a project or there’s the threat of the course becoming obsolete.
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