SW Reflection
Through this course and working with City of Hope Outreach in Conway I have learned and applied many skills that will benefit me throughout my life and career. Some skills that I was able improve through this experience are my communication skills and planning skills. In order to complete our main project, our entire team relied heavily on communication to plan out each aspect the project. I have participated in many group work assignments throughout my three semesters at Hendrix, but none of those assignments demanded the amount of communication that was required to smoothly plan out at create our semester project. I learned how to use many different group management software that resemble what I will have to use whenever I get a job after college. We were also required to communicate with our client Ambra McPeters to schedule meetings at appropriate times and discuss what to prioritize within our project. Through our communication with her, we were able to recognize and understand the needs of CoHO and give her the necessary tools to make her work more efficient.
My planning skills have greatly improved through this course and working with City of Hope. In order to finish each aspect of our semester project, my team had to prioritize certain aspects of the project and finish them in a systematic way. An example of this is our use of Gantt Chart, which allowed us to assign pieces of work to each member. Assigning work allowed us to focus on important aspects of the project that held higher priorities than other aspects. Our process of planning the project for the non-profit organization was based on the process that programmers go through in the workplace and working for CoHO helped to facilitate the process even more.
We started the semester out by having an initial meeting with Ambra and learning what kind of system she expected from us. We were able to use this information to create entity-relationship diagrams that turned out to be the backbone of our project. We learned from her about the importance of this project; she told us that it would help save her hundreds of hours of menial labor throughout the year if this is implemented in the way she wants. Knowing that this project will give a real impact to an organization that provides important services to the community turned this project from another lame school project to a project with real significance to something other than my grade.
A skill of mine that was challenged through this project was my ability to work in a group. In other group assignments that I had in the past, I never thought that working in a group was beneficial to finishing the project and doing well on it. On this semester project, however, working as a team was crucial to creating a function website that could be relied on to alleviate a lot of work of a lady who has many responsibilities to the people of her community.
This course and work with our client have helped me realize how greatly simple things like technology can impact the community. If our project is successful in carrying out its duty of tracking hours of all volunteers for this organization, then we would have such a tremendous impact on City of Hope Outreach. Ambra and her assistant will have the ability to spend much more time on fulfilling the CoHO mission. In the future and possibly for another one of my Odyssey projects, I plan to search for ways in which I can use what I learned in this course to create an impact on the community. I look forward to seeing if our project has the impact that we intended and Ambra wished for.
Most of the course work in the class helped strengthen my skills needed to contribute to and finish this project for CoHO. Without knowledge of HTML, CSS, jQuery, and database schema, we would not have been able to create a working website with the capabilities of what Ambra is looking for. We were able to take an idea and turn it into a functioning product, and that is more valuable of an experience than most classes I have taken so far.