Whoo-hoo the term is coming to the end and ahhhh the term is coming to the end. As we come to the end I wish I had more time to spend just learning and taking in all that I possibly can. But as we all know that is not how this works so I’ll offer my sincere reflection of this term and talk about its SWOT. What is SWOT you say, well I’ll tell you as I myself just found out that SWOT is strengths, weakness, opportunities and threats. So yes be prepared as I give what will probably look like fan service about this Capstone course that I have thoroughly enjoyed.
Alright so lets start out with a strength that had me absolutely astounded and that’s when the school sent me a brand new Oculus headset to work with for this VR project. I was thinking I would end up with a beat up old loaner from the land before time but having a new headset to work with was awesome and shows how amazing this course and school is. Ok sure I have to send it back at the end but the fact that they invested money back into the students to learn is a big sign of dedication to the students, so thank you. Next up I wanted to talk about group size. We had three in our group which I felt was prefect, as most people probably don’t have a lot of experience with remote project work with other people, myself included. It’s more than two, so it feels like real group work. Sorry to the courses where we partner up but usually in those cases if somebody wasn’t pulling there weight I could just complete the work on my own. It’s also not too large to where you could have a situation where you have to splinter off because some people are terrible and the only resolution is to make one superior smaller group who can handle the work without the others to slow you down. Whoops, all I’m really trying to point out is that three was the perfect number for me as some of the group issues did come forth but with three it was manageable which is what I think you want for a class. Learn and grow right.
Alright, next I think it would be best to talk about weaknesses and opportunities at the same time because is a weakness not just an opportunity to better yourself. The biggest weakness I’ve found would be that I think the class is supposed to closely simulate what the working environment might be like for a software engineer but unless you ask, at least for our group, our “project manager” was really just us doing what we thought was right. While the laissez faire is nice and freeing, I found myself wanting some advice and critic at times. So here is where the opportunity comes in, you could have two required meetings with the “project manager”. This would add the element that someone is watching your working and keeping an eye on how the project is going. I think this could also be a key time for feedback and keeping the scope of the project manageable. I know TAs and professors are busy but planning around meetings is something we will all have to figure out.
As for threats to this course, it is hard for me to say what is an actual threat because I’m pretty sure I’ll only be taking this course once and I’ve had a great time with it. I will mention something, and that is I shied away from putting myself in the top running for a real world project. I can’t talk for peoples experience with the real world projects but I was concerned I might have ended up having an experience similar to my other career that during school we had clinicals similar to an internship but unpaid. During these clinicals the amount of learning and teaching the supervisor gave could vary widely and then next year even if someone had a bad supervisor they still sent students to these bad clinical locations due to need. I think the biggest threat to this course is from the real world projects and supervisors who are unable or unwilling to teach and help students grow. Again I can’t really say how well this course does but I would hope it has kept high standards and expectations for the real world projects and their supervisors.
This may not be the last blog I ever do as writing these has also been fun. To the person who has to read it, and probably my only reader, thank for your time and I hope you got some level of enjoyment from it. It has been a blast taking this Capstone.
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