Weekly Reflection #1

 Oliver Barkan

4/13/2023

First Week Reflection

This first week of senior project has been a very fun and interesting process. I have greatly enjoyed being able to work on my own time and on a project that I find interesting. I find that I am the most productive in the mornings and by noon, so I try to get most of my work done around then. Throughout the project I will have had 4 different stages; Information gathering, writing and organizing, designing, and finally, editing. I have been able to finish two of the stages in the first week, and am ready to start the third phase, designing on Monday.

The first stage, Information gathering, was very fun and social, requiring the opinions of many different students and people involved with Proctor. I had initially sent out a survey to all of the students with a ten dollar Jake’s reward that was randomly selected among the people who had responded. Because the survey was sent out to the whole school, I had expected to get a lot of responses from it, but I was disappointed to see that only thirty-three people had responded out of the whole school. The survey asked questions about dorm life, sports, academics, and student life which are the main focuses of my project. Because I didn't receive as much feedback from the survey as I wished, I had to make it up by doing lots of interviews with students around campus. The interviews were very short, so I could get a lot of answers quickly and the questions were dependent on what I needed information on. If I needed more information on sports or food, then I would ask questions that would only give me information about those things. This became especially helpful when I realized I would be adding sections to the project that I hadn’t thought of before. Some of these sections that I came up with during the project were food, a for parents section, and a section for international students. Although this is the first phase of the project, It will most likely continue throughout the whole project to make sure I can not miss a single spot.

The second stage, writing and organizing is a less enjoyable and social phase that requires sitting down at a desk for long periods of time. This phase demands a lot of sifting through information from the information gathering phase and translating it into clear and clean sentences that I can put in the finished product. I grouped lots of the information I gathered into groups based on what I saw from the survey. Because I was very careful and methodical throughout the information gathering phase, it made the writing and organizing phase much easier and efficient than it could have beenI started this phase of the project on the third day or so of the project, and I have been continuing to work on it since. My guess is that the writing phase will most likely end in the last few days, which will be used only for editing and finishing the project.

So far I have been using my time very efficiently and spacing out how much I have done for this project very well. This next week, I will primarily be focussing on designing the project and creating prototypes, while also continuing to focus on the information gathering and writing phases.