I\u2019ve blogged a lot recently about everything that\u2019s happened to me outside my degree (well, actually that\u2019s not quite true, I\u2019ve not really blogged a lot recently, oops) so I think it\u2019s only fair that I take a look again at what goes on inside the hallowed walls of ECS.<\/p>\n
This term I have been super-busy with the Masters Group Design Project, or GDP as it\u2019s affectionately (?) known. The GDP is the hallmark of any ECS course and is a large real-life project tackled by groups of 4-5 students working on something tangible for an actual customer. This is really exciting as it means it\u2019s something that\u2019s actually going to be used out in the wild and not just another bit of coursework.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately I can\u2019t tell you too many specifics about what I\u2019m doing as it\u2019s protected by a non-disclosure agreement, but let\u2019s just say we\u2019re doing some pretty cool stuff with a Microsoft Kinect! It\u2019s actually coming together surprisingly well too (touch wood) and with just over two weeks left to go we\u2019ve nearly completed all the technical challenges we set out to do. It\u2019s *just* the case of doing full and proper testing and writing up the remainder of the report left to go now. But at 24000 words long that\u2019s a pretty major task in itself!<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve learned so much from the project \u2013 far more than I expected to in fact. It\u2019s taught me a huge amount about team-work, project management, time-management as well as valuable new technical skills of course. Everyone in my group has had some form of summer placement too, so they\u2019ve been able to share the various techniques they\u2019ve used at their respective companies for managing things so we\u2019ve all really learnt a lot from each other.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve heard it said that one of the main reasons employers really like ECS graduates is because of the GDP \u2013 now I can finally see why.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I\u2019ve blogged a lot recently about everything that\u2019s happened to me outside my degree (well, actually that\u2019s not quite true, I\u2019ve not really blogged a lot recently, oops) so I think it\u2019s only fair that I take a look again at what goes on inside the hallowed walls of ECS. This term I have been super-busy with the Masters Group …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":291,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[33308,33311],"tags":[428691,428692,13,428693],"class_list":["post-442","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-electronics-and-computer-science","category-southampton-university-life","tag-gdp","tag-microsoft-kinect","tag-project-management","tag-team-work","column","twocol"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3BSCk-78","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/studentblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/studentblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/studentblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/studentblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/291"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/studentblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=442"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/studentblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1151,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/studentblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442\/revisions\/1151"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/studentblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/studentblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/studentblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}