Over the course of this past fall semester of school I’ve been extremely lucky to experience one of the closest things to real world software engineering in application development in a classroom setting. I got to talk with a real customer about what their needs and wants were and try to form it into a working application for them to use. My class partnered with a portable medical group to create them an app that they could use to input, track, and maintain the medicine and supplies they had and were getting. We utilized Meteor, React, Javascript, MongoDB, and more to create out application called Med Warriors. I have some experience with these tools we used, but this was a great way for me to put my skills to the test and help me broaden my knowledge on them as well. It was a great learning opportunity too because the professor allowed the students to take control of their own project and allowed us to interpret the project in our own ways. He allowed for creative freedom which helped me learn to think bigger.
I learned a lot from this experience because it was my first time having a real customer and cooperating with them through meetings. This was the closest I’ve ever been to an internship with real work and problems that need to be solved. Also, this was my first time sticking with a team for the entire semester and working on one project the entire time. I usually switch teams and projects throughout the semester, so none of my projects are super in depth. I enjoyed how I was able to work on one project for a longer period of time because I was able to perfect my ideas in the application and fix them acccording to the customer critiques. I could add more features that I thought would be different and useful. I also learned how to be more independent because most of my classes before this were mostly lecture or small projects with no real customer and little ongoing development. This class, however, was mostly student driven where we were taking control of our projects and talking with the customers. This allowed me to push myself to be more driven because there is no one else pushing me to do things in a timely manner.
My experience in ICS414 was an unforgettable one. I enjoyed every bit of this class and I know that everything I learned in this class will be useful to me in the future. I’m grateful for this opportunity to have a customer and experience what it is like to work with a customer and create something that is providing for someone’s needs. Thank you to my teammates who put in a lot of time and effort into our project to create something I never thought I could do. I can’t wait to see what the future has in store for me!