Reflection

Ever since freshman year, i have dreaded this senior project. I dreaded the day i would finally have to work hard and use my thinking skills to finish the final piece of my high school career. When the time came though, i didn't feel the stress instantly. The stress and anxiety built up slowly as deadlines grew nearer and nearer. This project was the perfect way to test my abilities and skills that i have pretty much built up since kindergarten.

For this project i really had to use all my critical thinking skills and writing knowledge to produce the senior essay to the best of my ability. I think taking ERWC really helped give me an advantage in the essay portion over the other classes because i wrote essays much more frequently than the others. Communicating with my mentor was pretty easy because we both enjoy and have a love for computers. It was really great being able to speak with someone who knew so much about their job. She knew the ins and outs of the coding and programs that she uses daily. 

What i gained from the Capstone was that the road to success is going to be a long but prosperous one. This project aimed to give us students a taste of the real life. It aimed to give us a head start in getting ready for whatever the world has in store for us. It was a great learning experience because i got to choose something i felt pretty passionate about. If i was assigned a topic, i probably wouldn't have worked so hard on my research or essay because it wouldn't have given me the motivation to work on something i didn't quite care much for. Intellectually, i gained a more thorough knowledge on how the world works. Even though the premise of my paper was on technology, my argument about technology taking over the human work force let me learn about a problem i didn't think to be very serious.

Some of the challenges i faced were mainly of my own fault. Procrastination has always been a problem of mine as it is with most other people in the world. Even though i knew this project was my ticket out of High School, it still didn't make me want to work on it everyday to avoid stress. Throughout all my years of schooling, i have yet to learn that working in small increments is much easier and efficient than working in one big session. The only way i overcame this was through the deadlines and calendar Ms. Wenzell gave the class. It sort of helped me to stay on top of things because it let me know when the important due dates were coming up so i made sure i wouldn't miss them. As a sort of safety net for this project, i made sure i did my best with the in class curriculum of ERWC so that if my Capstone didn't turn out so well, i wouldn't be left wondering whether or not i would pass or fail. So far, all my hard work has been paying off. Overall, i think this is an excellent project to have the graduating class do. It is a very bittersweet feeling having to do this project. It really lets me know how dedicated and focused i am to graduating, but also exposes my weak points and how i can improve on those weak points. I can't say i'm entirely glad that this is our ticket out of high school but, i can say I've learned to appreciate it.

Hour 21-25

As i drove over to my mentors house, i was quite excited that i was finally supposed to be able to learn about the LDAP program and how to create my own data. When i arrived, i booted up my laptop and opened the program my mentor had asked me to download. We first tried connecting to a local host network that would be able to run independently through my laptop without the need of an outside network. Sadly, problems did occur. My mentor had overlooked the fact that my operating System, Windows, was not like the ones at her work or her laptop, Unix. We couldn't directly work on the program the same way she could at her work laptop because the setup of the program is much different and wasn't really meant for use on a Windows computer. We spent a majority of the time trying to Google ways to make the program run so i could at least try and create my own sort of data bases. After countless downloads and installs of various programs that she thought would help, we came to no success. She told me that yet again, she would be leaving on another business trip to Europe to go work on the data bases abroad and that she would not be able to return until the 22nd of May. She told me that when she returned that if i liked, we could meet up again and try to sort out this problem so that i could actually present something physically when it came to my final presentation date in front of the judges. I told her that we could try and do that but, i wasn't so sure if changing my whole presentation after presenting to my teacher would be a good idea since my teacher would be giving me feedback on what i need to do in order to improve my presentation. For the next hour or so, we just sat and talked about the overall gist of how i was doing so far on the project. I told her how i did on my essay and i let her read it. she thought it was a really good paper and it was nice for her to see young people taking an interest in technology that doesn't only include social media. She felt really bad that she wasn't able to show me how to create data bases but i assured her that it was not something to be sad about. Hopefully i will be able to meet with her when she gets back so i can finally learn how her field of work actually is. Who knows, maybe ill find a way to incorporate it into my final presentation for all the judges to see!

Hour 19-20

After a terribly long hiatus, i was finally able to meet with my mentor. She had been so busy with work and other things that it was tough to find time to meet with her. This worried me a bit because of my presentation date coming up for class and the end of the year drawing near. Since i haven't seen her in a while, i wanted to try and recap on some of the things i may have forgotten. She assured me that the next time we meet, she would help me out with the LDAP Administrator program so i would finally get some hands on material. It was very challenging for me to get something physical because everything is done on a computer. On my next visit i will hopefully be able to show something physical on this project but, i only intend to do so if i feel like it can relate to my presentation and not be seen as a filler for time.

LDAP Administrator Program. Hour 18

So the program has been installed on my computer for about a couple of weeks now, and i have yet to touch it. Today, i decided to open it up and see if i could figure anything out. Man, i don't understand what half of the words in this program even mean. After messing around with it for a good hour, all i was able to do was set up a profile. i didn't know what else to do because i knew of no servers that i could connect to. Guess i'll just have to wait until my mentor gets back from her business trip.

Hour 17

Met at my mentors house again. She told me that she got a call to a job in Europe for a while so shes going to be gone for a couple weeks. I don't really know what i'm going to do when shes gone for the next few weeks. Since the essay is already pretty much over besides the final draft, there isn't really any serious editing i can do. My mentor said that when she gets back, we can try and work on an LDAP Adminstrator data base because we have yet to do so. Maybe ill mess with the program by myself and see if i can learn some things on my own.

Trying to perfect my paper. Hour 13-16

With my Teacher draft of the essay being due in two days, it was crucial for me to start trying to perfect my paper with the feedback i had received from the peer edit as well as from my own thoughts. Typing up the paper obviously wasn't a brisk walk in the park. i noticed that in my first draft, i had a ton of run on sentences. If i wanted to make this as good a paper as i can, i needed to fix any errors and all errors i had. Now that i am sure of my topic, technology replacing humans in the workforce, it was much easier to pinpoint my research and make some minor adjustments. Although my paper was mostly based off of Jeremy Rifkin's article "New Technology and the End of Jobs", i found really strong arguments in an article by Alan Brown titled "Automation vs. Jobs". In this article, MIT two MIT Professors expressed their feelings towards the advancements of technology and how it directly affects the work force. This was a great find for me since it is directly related to my paper topic and argument. If i wasn't already lucky enough, i was able to find an article by a man named Henrik I. Christensen who directly responded to the thoughts and arguments of the two MIT professors. With these two articles, i am now able to compare and contrast the two sides of this argument, making it much more clear and accurate. Hopefully this teacher draft is as good as i hoped it to be. I tried my best to not procrastinate on the essay portion as i feel that this is the most important part of the whole project.

Hour 11-12

Met once again with my mentor. She tried to help me out with something i could physically present to the class when it came time to do so. I wanted to try and present some physical parts of her GAP data base info but obviously, its way too confidential for her to do that. I never knew that databases were so tightly guarded. She said that if she showed me some of the data that was stored in the LDAP Administrator program, that i couldn't record anything i saw in terms of numbers and letters because it must be kept secret. In order to access the GAP's network, she had to enter her own personal password but also a password that is constantly randomized that is view-able on an electronic key chain that is connected to her computer. every time she wants to log in to the servers from home, she must enter the randomized 8 digit code, and her own personal password as well as username. This security protocol is set up so that not one password can access all these important files.

Hour 10

For this hour, i spent my time working on the outline of my essay that would be due tomorrow, January 23rd, 2013. So far my approach in regards to my argument was that technology is a growing field that is working hand in hand with humans but as it runs out, technology is actually replacing the human workers instead of aiding them. I think i have found the basis of my paper. I will try and argue that technology is replacing human workers in all kinds of fields such as agricultural, automotive, construction, and maybe more. This is just an outline so nothing is finalized for sure yet.

Hours 8-9

Met again with my mentor today. We didn't work too much on the physical project today. We spent a majority of the time just talking about the different jobs in the IT world. I was okay with this because the Information Technology field is something i might want to pursue in life. I learned some things about a bunch of the different fields involved in the IT world. The IT world is pretty much one large team that works together to function properly. You cannot have one section run everything on their own. There needs to be a set group of people doing one thing that correlates to a different field. The most interesting one to me was the position of Lead Applications Developer. They manage software development teams in the design  development, coding, testing, and debugging of applications. I saw this position as one of the most important positions because of the managing skills and knowledge needed to pretty much run almost every other branch in a company.

Hour 7

As i thought more and more about the essay portion, i came up with the idea of just talking about technology in general. Technology is such an important and vital part of our modern society, IT administrating was only a small piece of the puzzle. My new focus is now to write an essay about technology. The new problem is i have no clue how i can create an argument out of technology when everyone can pretty much agree that we all need it and that its changed our society for the better.

Time to Research! Hours 5-6

With the first deadline for the paper coming up, paper outline, i had to start thinking about the essay portion of the project.The planning and construction of my paper was quite challenging. Since my mentors field of work was directly in correlation to IT work, it wouldn't really meet hand in hand with what i had planned for my essay portion of this project. At first, i wanted to write about the importance of these kinds of administrators and how much of an impact they have in business but, after trying to research this topic idea, i found it difficult to find enough evidence and claims to back up my argument.

Hours 3-4

For my second visit, i had come up with some things on my own which i wanted to learn specifically about the IT Administration work force. First, i wanted to learn more about what kinds of programs Gap used from day to day for their data basing. for these 2 hours, she pretty much told me a pretty basic rundown of the computer programs. One of the most key and vital programs they use is the LDAP Administrator program, which is pretty much the central directory of how GAP manages and secures very important client files for their different branches. She told me that later, she would try and work with me on creating my own practice data base using the LDAP software to get a better understanding

Hours 1-2

I met up with my mentor Maria de Rivera for our first meeting and introduction into my topic, Computer System Engineering. Maria's area of expertise is in Industrial Technology Administrating and an IT Admin for Gap in San Francisco. Before becoming an administrator, she had to go through all the different jobs related to that field such as developing, infrastructure, manager, and analyst. Throughout my meetings, i will be learning about all these different jobs and how they relate to computer system engineering

She pretty much gave me a run down of the very basic things. she described the main groups of people and what each group did and how they all interlinked with one another through a network.  I'm pretty excited to learn more about this aspect of business and work because as an avid computer user, i find that it would be very beneficial for me to get a deeper insight to something i really love.