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Monday, May 23, 2016

My Research Assistant Experience



So this semester was a bit different. I took on a part time job as a Research Assistant in the Department of Computer Science. I worked in Dr. Hussein Suleiman's research group under the supervision of Lighton Phiri, a PhD student. I made a web application that will be used by instructors to sequence their activities under the IMS global standard. There are many standards for sequencing and I implemented the Simple Sequencing standard. I successfully completed it and I couldn't be prouder of myself. Below are my reflections as I look back.

I learnt a good deal web application development with the MEAN stack. Having never used Node before, it was a bit of a learning curve. Node is particularly different due to asynchronous nature of functions.I had to ensure this doesn't introduce unpredictable behavior to the user.

I also got my hands on lots of open source projects. These include front end frameworks such as introjs.com guidejs, sequencejs, interactjs among many others. In addition to that, I wrote part of the backend in Java and I modified the apache-poi library to suit the application needs. Anyone involved in opensource can attest to how challenging it is to modify big libraries. My flavour of the library can be found here: https://github.com/imaculate/JavaSlides

Definitely improved my software thought process. I made a lot of mistakes and learnt from them. I had to make sure , the final product is convenient for the user to use. I had to go through hours (sometimes days) developing algorithms and debugging. It can be frustrating but its all worth it in the end.




On top of technical benefits, I exercised a good deal of time management balancing with my studies and working with deadlines. Being an RA gave me an excuse to go to PhD labs and experience the life of graduate students. It was also fun working with my supervisor and most importantly, it feels good to contribute to education research.


Below are some screenshots of the application.
I will post the link once the repository is publicly available.



Have a great week further!