Cumulative Reflection
Over the first three years of my college career I have had the opportunity to take several
different types of courses, and I feel that these different types of courses have prepared me well
for project building scenarios. Some of the methods for debugging and how to start preparing for
projects have stuck with me throughout my experience here. Since the start of freshman year
while taking CPR E 185 with Dr. Daniels, we started to learn the basics of what went into coding
a software project as well as how you can create it in many different ways. This course helped to
start to understand the best practice steps to use when creating projects. That next semester we
were also given the opportunity to take CPR E 186, which was a course that consisted of creating
a software project.
This class is a one credit course where you get the whole semester to create and design
any software project of your groups choosing. Even though the course is only one credit, I
believe it is a really good class to take because you get lots more experience early on.
Specifically, you gain communication skills working between group members, hands-on learning
with how you can submit code to GitLab for seamless code sharing, and getting more experience
with coding. The group I was in attempted to make a version of Iowa State monopoly, we chose
Java as the programming language. By the end of the semester we were able to create a very
simplified version of the game smaller than our original scope at the beginning of the semester.
But from creating this project and working with others, it really helped to gauge the amount of
work and effort that is needed by all members to complete a project.
The next course where I was presented with the task of creating an android application
was COM S 309, “Software Development Practices”. For this project we were able to select our
own groups and choose what project we wanted to create. My group chose to create a tutoring
application. There are two sides to building an application, there needs to be a front end where
the user interacts with the application and there must also be a backend for connections made
between the application and the server. This was a new experience for me in a project class,
where the team was virtually split up into 2 internal teams of backend and frontend development.
I felt like this class provided some great experiences working with teams inside of a team and all
still have to be collaborating towards a final product. This course was one of my favorite classes
that I’ve taken here and has made a major influence in my problem solving skills for completing
school work.
Finally, for my last project related course I am currently in CPR E 491, which is Senior
Design for engineering students. For this class we were assigned to projects based on our top
preferences and preferred teammates. I am working on the project where we are simulating the
potential impacts cyber security attacks could have on a power grid. The courses I have taken up
to this point have prepared me well for being able to go into a real world work environment and
utilize the problem solving skills I have obtained. In conclusion, I believe that if I hadn’t taken
up this major and the different engineering courses along with it, I wouldn’t have been able to
switch into a work environment as easily as it has been.
