10/10 Dr. Summers Meeting
- Caleb Lim
Overview
Met w/ Dr. Summers on October 10th at 2:45 PM. Here was the agenda I had for the meeting.
Agenda
Goal: set up contact with administration & org
Meeting goal: involve university stakeholders in addressing the problem space
Planner: degree planning space
Jupiter: student organization space
API: aggregating university data all in one place
Tertiary needs: university data
Meeting Summary
We ended up talking for 2.5 hours about various topics; he’s a very intelligent, well read, and down to earth guy. He told me that he is willing to be our point of contact with the university (play “stakeholder”). However, he will only help us if it makes sense to him.
Data
If we want university data, we need to demonstrate the why and benefits of having the data. We had a long discussion about ethics regarding data (i.e. he doesn’t like course evaluations, concerned w/ data being used to find the easiest professor, etc). He’s willing to serve as a “university stakeholder”.
He introduced an idea of attempting to correlate grades achieved from certain sections with grades students achieve in future sections. If we are interested in that problem space he offered to potentially give us that data?
Planner
University has a degree planner already in Galaxy (tried it in front of him, it’s kinda bad ). From his perspective, we should just scuttle the project since the university is already doing it.
Apparently, their planner scrapes coursebook as well?? There’s also not much usage of the planner.
Jupiter
His suggestion for this was to survey all the freshman who are not in a club via interviews and focus groups. This might be a good insight to pass along to the team.
General Ideas
I talked to him at length about our organization, and he mentioned that our problem is that we built first without doing much research into the problem (he suggested we change our motto to “we help students by building tools” instead of “we build tools to help students”).
One suggestion he gave us was to run tasks in parallel for projects (i.e. have 3 teams work on building an SOC scraper) and promote observation between projects. He did it for his class (build wind turbine) and it helped shape requirements, but led to different outcomes.
He also threw the idea of giving students credits for doing Nebula through EPICS. Tbh I don’t really like that much as it goes against our ethos, but I figured to chronicle it anyway.
From our conversation, I realized that our projects and divisions could benefit from some requirements engineering. Most of our projects started off with an idea and then we just built, but I think we can try to put a bit more thought in defining our objectives and formulating requirements. He suggested involving some faculty advisors in this discussion (ex. https://profiles.utdallas.edu/lawrence.chung )
We also talked about our projects needing “real accountability”. Right now since we have no real “consumers” of our product, we can kind of just do whatever we want. However, having consumers or stakeholders would help our teams be accountable for deliverables (and help provide some direction).
My brain is fried from the conversation I want to sleep