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.
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.
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