Professional Development
AIS Professional Development Workshops:
The AIS professional development workshops were designed to give some insight into the lives of people with industry experience. Sometimes this involved having recent MIS graduates come back and talk about their experiences in their new careers. Other times professionals came in and walked us through some new technology that they are using at their companies. Presentations like these were very helpful in the early stages of my time in the MIS program because of the exposure to different MIS related jobs and new technologies.
3502 Marka Prototype:
In 3502 I was given the opportunity to work on a prototype for Marka. They are a startup working on a digital solution to beach tags. My team was given the opportunity to develop a working prototype for their idea. This process included gathering requirements, building out the prototype, and presenting our idea to Marka. Creating the prototype included working in HTML, PHP, CSS, JavaScript, Ajax, and JSON. While I am by no means a professional coder now, this experience was helpful as it increases my understanding of the coding process and familiarized me with some of the jargon.
Fox IT Career Fair:
The Fox IT career fair was a great way to present myself to employers who specifically attended the event to find people like me. There was a diverse representation of companies that attended that the event, giving a good feel for the types of places you can take a degree with an IT background to. This is a unique opportunity that really helps showcase your individual skills because it is on a smaller scale than an event like the fall connection. This allowed for more one on one time with recruiters and was no doubt a help in securing several interviews for me early on in my senior year.