Senior Projects Take Over the World!

Hello dear blogosphere!

I hope that you're enjoying your spring, we've been experiencing monsoon season here in Lexington but we've had a couple glimmers of beautiful weather.

My last entry left you all a couple of months ago in the middle of winter semester.  While I was only taking 3.5 credits (classes), last semester was definitely was the busiest I've ever had.  This was due mostly in part to my second senior seminar, my Computer Science Senior Project.

A part of every major on campus, senior seminar allows students to complete a final and culminating work in their major field of study.  Most majors produce a major research paper, like I did in my Spanish Senior Sem, but there are some that do project based learning, like my computer science course.  Don't get me wrong, we had to write, oh we had to write; we ended up writing over 20+ pages of technical documents and proposals in addition to a final research paper and we also produced a final project.  A unique trait to the CS senior project is that we all worked in pairs to complete most of the work for the course except for personal reflections and the final paper.  The idea is that there is seldom a time in the CS field that you'll work on a project on your own without collaboration with at least one peer.

My partner and I created a interview tutorial and simulator targeted at the first time interviewer; I worked on the webdesign and the collection of information and population of the tutorial and my partner did the simulator.  We worked with Michael Cronk from Career Development and Gary Deaton, the director of the Writing, Rhetoric, and Communication program to bridge both information on how to conduct yourself verbally and nonverbally in an interview.

A screen shot of our web interface

If you're interested in checking it out, you can find it at the KING Interview Tutorial and Simulator.

Some of the other projects that were done include a spider identification project (SPIDA), a class scheduler, a work scheduling system, an interactive genetics tutorial program, and a couple of other neat things.  If you're interested in Computer Science at Transy feel free to email me or leave a comment here if you want to know more about our senior projects.