- Sven Goran Eriksson
Well, what a ride! I started out in January of this year proposing to do a Master's thesis as part of my degree in Professional and Technical Communication. As part of my thesis, I developed a web-based application for the assessment of student portfolios by a community of readers. Keep in mind that I hadn't programmed since my undergrad days at NJIT (25 years ago!) and so I was faced with the daunting task of becoming proficient at HTML, learning PHP, and learning MySQL. All this in the course of a few weeks so that I could actually develop the application and have it finished in time to perform usability testing and complete my thesis.
This wasn't just a theoretical application, mind you. I had to ensure that the application actually worked because it was going to be put to full use on May 13th of 2010 when the freshmen-level writing professors would be using it to score approximately 80 student portfolios.
I was terrified the night before the actual portfolio assessment session. I had visions of the application crashing and burning in all its glory. I had tested it as much as possible during development, but that's nowhere near the same as putting it out there for 20 or more professors to use in real time.
So was it a success? Yes! Did it have problems? Yes! I realized that the way I had implemented adjudications did not work based on the way the application was actually used, so I have already started to redesign that part of the application. But in general, the application performed beautifully.
So what does this all mean? It means that perseverance and the development of knowledge are just as important to defining success as a positive outcome. The application did not work flawlessly, but there were no recriminations from the professors - there were suggestions of how to make the application better, there was increased knowledge and understanding on my part, and all those factors together point to the fact that the entire experience was a success.
In fact, it was such a success that I have now graduated from NJIT with my Master of Science in Professional and Technical Communication, and I am subsequently applying for admission to NJIT's PhD program in Information Systems. I'm sure that experience will generate even more posts to this blog, so wish me luck!
