Back in July, I received an e-mail from one of my 2nd year professors advertising for participating in Greg Wilson’s Undergraduate Capstone Open Source Projects. There was a brief description and I thought it sounded really cool! In fact, I was pretty excited and was immediately interested in doing it. I really enjoy tool development and that’s what was advertised as the projects being. Basically, we were expected to put in about one course worth of work each week towards the project and in return we would get a senior project course credit and a trip to Toronto the last weekend in September. I thought “What better way to spend my last term than taking interesting French courses during the day and working on a cool project in the other time?”
I almost didn’t apply, despite being so strongly interested! As part of our application, we had to submit our resume, which was no problem – I had updated my resume after my previous work term, even though I didn’t go through the job search process. But we also had to submit a statement of why we were interested. This is something I’ve always had difficulties with – explaining why I’m interested in something, particularly with words, even if my eyes just light up when I read about it! I did eventually end up applying in time and within a couple of days, I received an acceptance e-mail.
I ended up working on the MarkUs project. It was a really interesting experience to work with Ruby on Rails. My previous web programming experience had been through service calls through Perl and through PHP, both mixed in with HTML and CSS templating.
A really valuable aspect of the term was the 3-day code sprint in Toronto at the end of the second (third for most schools) week of classes. It not only allowed us to spend some concentrated time working on the project, but it also allowed the entire team to meet face-to-face in person before we really got into the work and to have the organizational meeting on who was going to work on what for the term in person.
Our team was distributed, but we were all in the Eastern time zone, which definitely helped a bit in setting our weekly meeting time. Three people were from Quebec, one other from my school and then several from the organizing school in Toronto. Sometimes when I was having issues, I definitely missed being able to just walk up to someone else and discuss it. The other student from my school and I worked on a Notes system together, so that graders and instructors could share notes about a particular group’s work on an assignment.
Overall, it was a good experience and an interesting last CS course. It never really felt like a course, even when we wrote our own marking scheme – that really just felt like a contract to what we were each supposed to complete for the term.
It wasn’t people like me who have spent over a year working on co-op who benefited the most from this project – it was the people who were in third or fourth year and about to graduate with little to no work experience. The project that I worked on last term, MarkUs was in use at the University of Toronto for a few courses and as we were developing new features, some people were working on fixing bugs they found in the production system, which really made it feel similar to simply working part-time during the school term.
Reflection on my MarkUs/UCOSP experience
Back in July, I received an e-mail from one of my 2nd year professors advertising for participating in Greg Wilson’s Undergraduate Capstone Open Source Projects. There was a brief description and I thought it sounded really cool! In fact, I was pretty excited and was immediately interested in doing it. I really enjoy tool development and that’s what was advertised as the projects being. Basically, we were expected to put in about one course worth of work each week towards the project and in return we would get a senior project course credit and a trip to Toronto the last weekend in September. I thought “What better way to spend my last term than taking interesting French courses during the day and working on a cool project in the other time?”
I almost didn’t apply, despite being so strongly interested! As part of our application, we had to submit our resume, which was no problem – I had updated my resume after my previous work term, even though I didn’t go through the job search process. But we also had to submit a statement of why we were interested. This is something I’ve always had difficulties with – explaining why I’m interested in something, particularly with words, even if my eyes just light up when I read about it! I did eventually end up applying in time and within a couple of days, I received an acceptance e-mail.
I ended up working on the MarkUs project. It was a really interesting experience to work with Ruby on Rails. My previous web programming experience had been through service calls through Perl and through PHP, both mixed in with HTML and CSS templating.
A really valuable aspect of the term was the 3-day code sprint in Toronto at the end of the second (third for most schools) week of classes. It not only allowed us to spend some concentrated time working on the project, but it also allowed the entire team to meet face-to-face in person before we really got into the work and to have the organizational meeting on who was going to work on what for the term in person.
Our team was distributed, but we were all in the Eastern time zone, which definitely helped a bit in setting our weekly meeting time. Three people were from Quebec, one other from my school and then several from the organizing school in Toronto. Sometimes when I was having issues, I definitely missed being able to just walk up to someone else and discuss it. The other student from my school and I worked on a Notes system together, so that graders and instructors could share notes about a particular group’s work on an assignment.
Overall, it was a good experience and an interesting last CS course. It never really felt like a course, even when we wrote our own marking scheme – that really just felt like a contract to what we were each supposed to complete for the term.
It wasn’t people like me who have spent over a year working on co-op who benefited the most from this project – it was the people who were in third or fourth year and about to graduate with little to no work experience. The project that I worked on last term, MarkUs was in use at the University of Toronto for a few courses and as we were developing new features, some people were working on fixing bugs they found in the production system, which really made it feel similar to simply working part-time during the school term.