Senior Seminar was the last course of my IT program. It's my capstone course that showcases all of the skills, knowledge, and experience that I've gathered throughout my college journey. This course was extremely brutal and unforgiving, but highly necessary. Some of the takeaways from this course were: you're going to need to have a lot of shattered expectations and you aren't going to have fun in this course; it's all business. To elaborate, you shouldn't come into this course with expectations of having the opportunity to select your team members or choosing a role explicitly. You are assigned a team at random to reflect the real world. Also, your role is selected by a project manager who will ask you to complete weekly deliverables. There is a strong emphasis on communication, which leads one to implement scrum tactics from the agile framework to create meetings in this course. Having the ability to catch the team up to speed or discuss the details of the project is extremely valuable. Not only does it get the team on the same page but it's also a good refresher so that the scope of the project and the constraints are not lost on the team.

My team decided to use AWS (Amazon Web Services) as the basis for our coordination and development. The difference from this course and others is that in Systems Analysis & Design and IT Project Management we only had to conceptualize these designs and model what these designs would look like or act like. In Senior Seminar, we have to physically and logically develop everything ourselves and prove that these designs are functional and interoperable. Working with my team, we had to set up meetings weekly in order to discuss the many elements of our project. We proceeded using an agile method of development. As the project manager, I had many responsibilities to consider: making sure everybody had their weekly deliverables, understanding the many different elements of the project, and providing backup for my team whenever they needed help (to name a few important roles). The first part of the project we finished was the database, which we deployed it using Amazon Aurora, a database management system that is compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL. Next, we built the website, which was hosted on a domain I purchased for the team. Lastly, we spent about a month on the mobile app development. All in the meanwhile, I was working on the network map and security protocols for the application, which includes authentication and accessibility. After finalizing our project, we presented it in front of our school faculty, who reviewed our work and gave their critique.

Below you can see everything from our final presentation to our full documentation (including the project scope and all of the deliverables).