CST 300 Week 5

Week 5

This week we covered a bit about making and editing videos for YouTube. This appears to be leading into a presentation that we will have to do soon via video, which is making me pretty nervous. Every time I have to make a video for something, I end up worrying about it way too much and stressing out. Granted, I don't like in person presentations either. We've also been looking over internship and graduate degree information. Personally, I won't get an internship in the field because I'm already working in the field. However, I can vouch that an internship is a great idea. We have three interns at my work right now and I have watched several of the interns become full time employees since I've been at the company. I am currently planning on looking into graduate programs in the future, but right now this degree is definitely my focus. When we graduate, it will have taken me 10 years to get my bachelor's degree. So, baby steps for me! We've also been starting the prep work for our new essays. I'm doing mine on 3D printing and intellectual property. So far, I've found some great stories and articles on the topic and have been getting very excited about it. Unfortunately, I've been very busy this week and am behind (which I hate). Hoping to catch back up next week! 

Support and Comment on Teammates' Goals

Again, I'm reviewing my only two teammates on their educational and career goals:

John's post describes his goals as being largely directed at providing his children with a good education and retiring early. John and I have pretty different goals, but I can relate to retiring early (I've been doing the best I can to save money for that). All of his goals appear to lead up to that and I think that's enough to motivate him to accomplish them. Perhaps he could look at some of the applications for Genentech (or a similar company) and incorporate some of their requirements into his goal planning. Or, he could focus on setting a more specific timeline for his goals (outside of the CSUMB program).

In Ashley's post regarding educational and career goals, she explains how she has goals, but doesn't want to be let down by them. I understand that because I have also been let down by my own goals (which is how I ended up in this program). Instead of making long term goals, she would benefit from short term "bursts" of goals to help lift her goal setting spirits. Goals that take too long to accomplish can be easy to get away from. Building up the momentum this way might make goal setting a much more fun task.

Possible Capstone Ideas

Here are a few potential ideas for my capstone project:

1. A karaoke application using the Chromecast and a cell phone as a mic. 
2. A virtual recipe box where you can scale your recipe to fit the number of servings and create shopping lists.
3. A natural disaster preparedness applications that picks up your location and give you recommendations for emergency preparedness kits and guides. So, if you live in a tsunami zone or earthquake zone, the recommended items would be specific to what you would need. It would also provide a printable document that describes where to go or what to do in those situations.

CST 300 Week 4

Week 4

Having just withdrawn from my philosophy course at Santa Monica College this week, it was kind of funny to have more philosophy reading. I've enjoyed reading the assignments on ethics and really look forward to doing research for my ethics paper. This has made it a little difficult to keep my eye on the industry analysis paper. Since I didn't get any reviews from my peers online for the industry analysis paper, I had my parents and my significant other review my paper. I think they all came up with good critiques, but it's been difficult to get the time in to address all of them. I'm still proud of my paper and hope that shows. As far as the lecture section of the course goes, I've done goal setting practices before so it doesn't feel like I've really learned anything new there, but I understand why it's emphasized. One small complaint is that it would be nice to have links to pages that don't require a subscription.

Reading on Goal Setting

Again, there were a few pages that I couldn't completely finish reading because you have to be a member, which were the pages on backwards planning, well-formed outcomes in goal setting, and personal mission statements. However, I get the idea of some of them. From the pages I was able to access, I acquired some good tips, like making each goal statement positive and sure. It seemed very light to acknowledge and move on if your goal isn't attainable. I thought that could be pretty demoralizing.

Here's my goal plan for owning a home:

• 10 year: I will own a home.
• 5 year: I will have a Master's Degree.
• 1 year: I will have either a promotion at work or a significant pay raise.
• 6 mo: I will know which city I want to buy my home in.
• 1 mo: I will know my preferred school where I will go for my master's degree program.

Based on the quiz (I got a 56) "How Good is Your Goal Setting?," I need to work on my motivation. Perhaps I'll be following some of their advice to make some quick wins. However, It was pretty dead on about me being super prepared.

Career Goal Setting Reading

After reading this, I've realized that I really need to work on networking and negotiating to prepare for my next potential job. There's some very solid advice in this article. I believe it's easy to look over or not consider how much you're worth. Putting a price on yourself can be a daunting task and many people (like me!) probably price themselves too low. Also, some fantastic advice in this article is to begin tracking accomplishments. Listed here are the 7 career goals you need to succeed:

1. Know your worth. Know how much money you should be making.
2. Track accomplishments. Track accomplishments as you achieve them.
3. Networking. Networking is the best way to get your foot in the door for a better career, or really anything. 
4. Self assessment. Consider where you're at. If you don't like what you see, make goals to change that and get to a state you'd like to be in.
5. Update your skills to keep up with change. Lots of change happens every day. Learn new things in any field to keep yourself relevant.
6. Negotiate. Getting an offer and negotiating pay is part of a business transaction. Use it like it is.
7. Allow for downtime. Rest and have fun outside of work!

Educational Goals

These are set up in a two year spread, as that's approximately the duration of the program.

• 2 year: I will host an application that I've built on my own server that I've built.
• 1 year: I will know how to set up my own server.
• 6 mo: I will have the MVP for an application built.
• 1 mo: I will know which application I want to build.

Career Goals

My career goals are as follows:

• 10 year: I will have a job that I can see myself at for a long time.
• 5 year: I will have attended many meet up events and intertwined myself into the community to network.
• 1 year: I will know what I need to do to get the position I'd like at the company I'd like.
• 6 month: I will have a list of companies that I would like to work for, where I can build something meaningful.
• 1 month: I will have learned a new technology while at work.

Review Team Members Time Management 

Since I only have two team members, I will be reviewing both of theirs. It's difficult to compare theirs to mine, as I don't have a family (only a significant other) and both of them do. John and I are similar in that we're both trying to race from work to an in person class and then do homework following that for this course. Ashley and I are not so similar because she still has a young child and needs to be home taking care of her child after work.

For John my comments and suggestions are:

• Pack a sandwich or something for dinner to keep him going through class.
• Talk to instructors regarding work conflicts if tardiness is a regular issue.
• Stick to his planned schedule, or don't schedule his time as tightly.

For Ashley my comments and suggestions are: 

• Log what she's actually doing and look at what areas her time is going to. Prioritize the schedule and adjust accordingly.
• Look at the syllabus. While there isn't complete detail on assignments, there's at least an overview of what will be happening.

CST 300 Week 3

Week 3

This week has been a bit crazy with the rough draft of the paper being due and everything. I had all my resources and paper structure ready to go, but it still took me about six hours to write six pages. I guess I overthought a lot of it. And after I submitted it, I was looking over the requirements for reviewing another paper and immediately noted some mistakes. It's an "oh, well at least I'm leaving someone something to review" kind of moment. Just too tired to open it back up and make those corrections this week. Next weekend sounds like a better, more fresh start. The lecture section seemed incredibly light. I am assuming because of the time commitment for writing our papers. I really appreciated that this week. I'm getting settled into my other courses. I didn't have any homework for my data structures course this week (don't know why not), but it did free me up to get excited about and put some extra effort into my paper. Oh, and I did fill in my time for my appointment with Claudia after she sent it out so I guess we will get to review all of our schedules for the next couple of years. Maybe it's a good time to ask if the course I'm currently taking will actually apply to my missing general education course requirement...

Time Management and Study Strategy Websites

St. Nobert College's Project Management page

Most of the information on this site I've seen at some point in time. I did, however, like that they listed a more detailed section of the different phases. It always seems like there's so much that happens in the development phase that's glossed over. As I expected, the development phase has a lot of items. Also, I like that there's a "SMART" acronym for judging if the goals are good, even if it's vague to be able to really set them by the acronym. The problem with setting these goals is that we're all human and guessing deadlines and things related can be exceptionally difficult because it's a difficult thing to judge. While you may get better over time, it's never going to be perfect. The project network graph was new to me this time around. It's interesting that the nodes are points in time, as opposed to particular points of the work. This format makes me uncomfortable with the dummy activities. It doesn't feel very clean.

MindTools Time Management page was actually assigned last week as well, but I didn't get to writing about the information on the page last week. 

There are a ton of links on this page and the structure, while looks nice, deters me from wanting to use this page. While one of the pages within this page also defines "SMART," they do it exceptionally brief. Like, just what the letters stand for. That does't provide too much insight and it makes it easy to skip over.

Living with someone else makes me really appreciate the section on time management challenges. I've always considered myself prompt and actionable. But, that's changed a bit since living with my significant other. It still drives me crazy if we're even five minutes late somewhere. Unfortunately, I'm not a member of MindTools (and I don't really want to be) so the article is cut off prematurely.

There are some pages that aren't cut off and they're pretty good, but I feel like I've seen or heard most of it at some point in my life. I grew up in a household filled with self help books and even did an online Stephen Covey workshop a few years ago with my mom. Anyway, I suppose they're all good reminders for how we should plan our days and avoid distractions while in our productive time block. A lot of these are good to read and you might remember a few when you're out in the world again, but realistically the average person will probably do so for maybe a few days and then return to their same, bad habits.

The Study Strategies and Guides on time management page

Universities need to decide if they're just there to excel their students, or if they're a stepping block to a career (granted, they could mix the two quite successfully). Unfortunately, it seems that students think that it's necessary to attend college to get a nice paying job and many universities aren't helping them do that (because that's not what they're designed for).

From there, I think the computer science department at these universities can take the advice relevant to them in the article.

For those using college to get a degree, I definitely agree that those perusing careers need to have publicly available code, live projects to demonstrate, and a portfolio in addition to having a resume. However, there is a lot of strength in a resume. Many employers won't even look at a student's portfolio without first viewing their resume. Schools should also be helping out with the resume. I completely agree that each student should learn IDE-less software development. This allows the student to get up and running on any system. If they run into a pair programming interview on a system they don't know, they will at least be able to use the basics (command line and vim).

Regarding programming just for the knowledge base, there are many items within this list that I should and would definitely like to know. Like, the IT things and general networking. All of the cryptography section is extremely relevant right now, especially with all of the data leaks that have been happening. Ideally, no one would graduate from college with a degree in computer science and store passwords in plaintext (or something crazy like that). I find it interesting that there isn't more of an explanation on testing. There is one, but it's become very important to many people in the industry to add test suites to their products (mostly integration and unit testing). Overall, there are some pretty solid recommendations.

CST 300 Week 2

Week 2

Learning Strategy Reflection

There are many resourceful study suggestions within Bob Kizlik's "Effective Study Sills" article. There are many good studying reminders that he covers, like having a set study place. It's like the practice of only using your bedroom to sleep, so when you're in bed your body knows that it's time to sleep (which I actually follow). I think that is the most solid advice. I hadn't heard of the Survey, Question, Read, Recite, Review (SQ3R) method before and I really like the idea behind it. The acronym could use some work, but the process of actively learning is great and I will try it out. 

My strengths

• Making and Revising a Schedule My free time has always been consumed by organizing and planning out everything. You should see what happens when I am in charge of Thanksgiving dinner! I will have the most perfectly planned out study schedule.
• Taking Notes I take notes daily. There are many reminders and questions (mostly to myself) throughout my computer, phone, and on post it notes at home and at work. Taking notes for assignments is no different. It makes studying take longer, but it can be worth it, especially when wanting to refresh your knowledge base before exams.
• Preparing Outlines and Writing Papers Preparing outlines goes along with my obsessive nature with organizing. Preparing an outline is possibly my favorite and most looked forward to part of writing a paper. In fact, I do this when writing simple emails to coworkers or making event schedules with friends. I always want to ensure that I cover the right topics.  

My weaknesses

• Reading Unfortunately, I'm not great at completely focusing on the text in front of me. I find myself rereading paragraphs way too often because I have zoned out and am not in tune with what's going on in the text. Actively reading would prove tremendously helpful to me and I wouldn't be eating up so much precious time with my rereading!
• Surveying Skipping straight ahead to the content and not considering what I'm going to be looking at is definitely something that I should improve. Many times I find that I haven't even read the title of what I'm looking at. Just want to find the quick answers in the thick of it.
• Not Reading Aloud to Myself I had no idea that this was actually bad practice. I usually read aloud to myself thinking that I will understand something better. This is a lot of the reason why I want to study at home (I don't want to be the crazy person at the local coffee shop). I'm going to try it and maybe it will improve my overall reading abilities.

Preview Time Management Skills 

Mind Tool's Time Management information is useful, but I am pretty comfortable with my time management skills. I'm very focused and stay on task, especially at work. However, sometimes I can overbook myself and need to learn to scale back my load in order to not overwork myself, making me feel exhausted. See my day spent at work is described in my activity log below.

Project Management Basics

There are a few videos or slideshows covering project management. A summary of each video is described below their heading.

Introduction to Project Management

This video is very similar in content to the project management slideshow from Corpedia that is described below. A project manager (PM) oversees a project, which is a task that has a set beginning phase and ending phase. Within the project there are specific phases like initiating, planning, and execution. The PM is there to ensure that their project won't fail due to time, cost, scope, or quality issues.

Project Management Introduction ("An Applied Framework for Project Management" Corpedia Education Course)

Again, this video describes the different stages of project management. However, this slideshow also describes the different roles of people that could be involved in a project (aside from the PM). They bring up the stakeholders, sponsors and team members as well, which I think is much more important that the PM alone. It also covers how goals are met much better with a project management system.

It's interesting to see such a broad overview of project management. Since I've been working in the industry, I've really caught on to the shortfalls of project management and the technical team members. In this slideshow there was a section where they went over different stages of a project. Having a section for execution and nothing more involved is basically what I've seen when working under a corporate PM and it left me extremely unsatisfied and frustrated at times. There's a lot more that goes into execution for a tech company (like quality assurance, refactoring, etc.).

Project Management: What is a work Breakdown Structure (WBS)?

The lady in the video explains the importance of defining the "deliverable" for a project in order to keep the team on track, with an end goal in mind. She explains the importance of defining a hierarchical structure with the overall project at the top and the individual tasks at the bottom for defining the entire scope of the project. This hierarchy can include sub projects, phases, and small deliverables. However, there should be one overall deliverable item that the project will return.

Project Management: What is a Gantt Chart?

The Gantt chart is a horizontal bar graph that indicates time periods. Each bar in the chart can indicate a task. While some tasks may have to wait until another is complete, others may be done concurrently. There can be many indicators in these charts, like their completeness, the relation to today, and a variety of estimated durations. Gantt charts can also be created in Microsoft Excel.

Previous Capstones

At the end of the CSUMB online bachelor's degree program there will be a capstone project that I will need to complete. Here is an overview of a few previous capstone projects: 

Capstone #1 - Steebly Collaborative Programming Tool

Steebly was a project that allows developers, or aspiring developers, to collaborate live with a their group. The project appeared to have been done very well, supporting several different languages. Also, their team shirts made them seem very official. Of course, there's always room for improvement (especially in an agile process). I'm glad they chose a dark theme for their tool, but maybe they could later add a feature to let the individual user choose their theme. I'm also sure they could revisit some of their initial methods and improve their web application's efficiency. 

Capstone #2 - Eagle Eye Ag Tech Graphic Identity Package

The graphic identity package designed for Eagle Eye Ag was a project that basically bootstrapped marketing tools for a company called Eagle Eye Ag Tech. While the project's presenter seemed he could have used some practice presenting the project, the information he presented in his slides appeared that he did the project well. The logo came out nicely and looked appealing on marketing materials. I would have been interested to see what website he came up with using Dreamweaver. 

Capstone #3 - Traditional Chinese Health Concepts Animation

This capstone is a five minute animation of information regarding tradition Chinese health concepts. There were some still images of the project and the process of creating the animation on the slideshow, but it would have been nice to see a brief clip of the animation at some point (even if it's just a gif) that plays on the slide. It's impossible to tell from the slideshow presentation if the project was well done, but the presentation was nice and he was informative regarding his execution. 

Weekly Summary

This week has been crazy busy. I have been studying all night after work each day and still feel behind. I've started two more courses and settling into all of them is taking some time. I rewrote one of my course's syllabus' because there was too much padding (I learned that this is a legitimate criticism this week thanks to the reading assignments for the lab) and I couldn't easily find what I was looking for when referencing it. 

New Rules

Reading Thomas L. Friedman's "New Rules" article was a pleasure. He perfectly illustrates how America as been told in recent decades to just work hard and that's all you need to succeed and it's no longer enough. Unfortunately, I've seen too many people work harder and still not succeed. Working along side people at Starbucks with degrees that couldn't get a job and myself being one of those people that was hired for a technical job with no formal education allows me to relate to Friedman's point.

Writing Lab

The writing lab has been a bit steeper in work load this week. This week I've been considering my industry analysis paper so much more than last week. Reading through all of the APA formatting guides has also been a bit different. I'm working on committing it all to memory, as I've been used to MLA format. For some reason I'm consistently missing a couple of questions on the quizzes for the reading assignments. There is always at least one question that I don't know where to find. I read all of the material and find it frustrating that I'm still missing things. Maybe one of these weeks I will actually get all of the answers correct. 

CST 300 Week 1

Week 1

This week we spent most of our time introducing ourselves in various ways and getting acquainted with one another. Many of the other students in the program are also working full time while trying to obtain their degree on the side. While I'm somewhat worried for all of us, I'm also relieved that I'm not the only one. I've been very nervous about how I'm going to be able to complete all of the assignments with regular life events happening on the side. Most of the material was either preparatory to get us ready for the intensity of studying online, while other material was a refresher. We had a large reading that covered several types academic writing (essays, journals, etc.) that was helpful for me since I haven't taken any courses in about two years. There were also a couple of forums, which were mostly basic introductions and experience descriptions.

5 Step Strategy for Student Success

Overall, the steps covered in the 5 Step Strategy for Student Success with Online Learning article were good advice. However, for myself I will have to tweak many of these. For example, the article recommends logging onto the course home page at least three times a week, but for myself I know it would be beneficial to just make it a daily habit in order to keep myself up to date. I'm planning on opening up iLearn every week day prior to work to check up on what's happening. That should keep me on track since it's a constant reminder that I have things to do. Making connections with classmates is probably the best advice in the article.  I think that having people that make you accountable and feel obligated to join in the assignments is crucial to enjoying and performing well in any situation, especially online.

Weekly Study Time Commitment

I work during the day from Monday through Friday, so my available time to study is weeknights and weekends. For some odd reason Thursday traffic is the worst in LA, so I'm not even going to bother attempting to get anything done on Thursday outside of work and my only in person course.

Daily Study Tasks

• Monday (Overflow < 2 hours)
• Finish up any assignments that weren't completed in scheduled time.
• Tuesday (Overflow < 2 hours)
• Finish up any assignments that weren't completed in scheduled time.
• Wednesday (2 hours)
• Check emails and notifications for module.
• Use defined module material to make a schedule for the week.
• Check off "low hanging fruit" or any quick to-do items (quick forum posts, maybe).
• Thursday (0 hours)
• Friday (2 hours)
• Read lecture items (do quizzes if completed).
• Saturday (2 hours)
• Read lab items (do quizzes if completed).
• Sunday (6 hours)
• Read any items that weren't read yet.
• Complete quizzes, assignments, and forum posts.
• Meet with group?

My Schedule Looks Busy

Time spent at work is highlighted in blue. I've left gaps between study time and work to allow myself some time to decompress and eat. Green is study time. Some of that is allocated for this ProSeminar course, while the rest is for completing homework assigned for the Data Structures course and reading material for Philosophy. 

Group Resume

The title of this assignment seemed to cause some confusion. The assignment is to build a fake company with your team, where you will have to pitch your company to a potential client or customer. So, it appeared that many people (like me) weren't sure if the assignment was supposed to be like a regular resume format, or like an about us page in flier format for a company. My team took the flier route and I'm pretty happy with how it came out. While we were short a member, the three of us were pretty quick at getting something together. My main complaint about this assignment is that we had four days to try and get a group together to get the rough draft turned in, which is difficult to coordinate with a whole group of people with various schedules. And then following that, we had to get together a separate day in order to finalize the resume. Being able to pick just one day out of an entire week is much easier to do with more than two people.

Our final team resume: 

Industry Analysis Paper

I've looked over the requirements for the industry analysis paper and have decided to look into a company in the healthcare industry called Theranos. I really like what they're doing and would love to eventually work for them. I don't want to give away too much right now, but I'm excited to learn more about the company and get more of an idea of the employment options in the healthcare tech field.