Spending A Lot Of Time
09 May 2023
I Took A $1000 College Class For Job Experience?
This spring semester I decided to take a software engineering class (because it was a requirement). From this class I expected to simply learn more about engineering software and regurgitate information I learned from my previous ICS class but in more applicable situations. This was not the case. We were constantly assigned assignments with real world application such as creating programs, websites, and working together in a team.
So What Did I Actually Learn?
A lot actually, not only was this class enjoyable but it taught me a lot about project based leraning and how to engage in projects in general. Something that used to annoy me a lot in previous classes was the coding standard (see my other essay for more information). It felt very restricting to be forced to code in a different way than what I was used to and couldn’t easily conform to. After having to use these code standards in a project with other people it became clear to me that since we all use the same coding format it was easier to go through people’s code and understand what was going on as if I myself wrote it. It really showed to me that an individual cannot and should not try to overtake other members of a project. The phrase team effort really shines here and showed that we should all try to be on the same page, whether it be through a coding style or through any other means of a project outside of coding.
I also learned a bit about design patterns (more about this in my other essay). There were a lot of problems we had to solve in this class but many of them were similar to each other in terms of what it was about or the material surrounding it. For example, we had to make this one website 3 different times using 3 different methods. Whenever I ran into a problem with one of the methods I checked back to a previous method to see how I interpretted the fix there. Especially in this class how we used to WOD format, a lot of issues that came up during the testing portion of the class were problems we encountered previously in practice assignments and videos, making us more confident in our ability to find a solution fast.