Week 7

For class on week 7, Dr. Tao lectured about how to run effective meetings. To have a meeting be effective we need an agenda before the meeting starts, someone taking minutes and a moderator to make sure everyone stays on topic. I'd never though about any of these things, but I'm glad he went over it so now we won't be wasting any time in meetings.

He also put us in groups based on our major and career interests. I put my capstone/career interests as game programming, so I was put in a group that were also interested in developing games. Then he told us that in our groups we would be researching the technology of our choice. I'm glad we were put into groups based on similar career interests/major because it was easy coming up with technologies everyone was interested in. I think we came up with a lot of great topic ideas and am looking forward to research any one of them.

We also had to create a SMART goal for our degree plan. I had a pretty hard time making it as long as the minimum requirement, but here's my SMART goal.

I want to finish all my required classes, and learn as much as I can in those classes, by the end of Spring 2012 and graduate with a 3.5 GPA or higher. I also want to take one class outside of my major that interests me. I want to gain efficient programming and communication skills from my classes that will make me stand out when applying for a job as a software engineer or as a video game programmer after I graduate. For my capstone, I want to produce a game that allows me to explore and understand the process of both software development and game development, display my programming skills, and possibly implement some form of artificial intelligence.