So what have I been doing?

In November Treah and I took a trip to Denver. I spent the week in AIX training, Treah spent the week site seeing. We also saw my brother (Ryan) and his girlfriend (Jes) when we were out there. The next week we went to Vermont to see my parents for Thanksgiving. Ryan and Jes rode back from VT with us and went to a WVU football game.

In December I finally graduated from the Software Engineering Master’s program. My parents and grandparents drove in from Vermont, my brother flew in from Denver, and Treah’s parents drove up from Beckley, all to watch the ceremony. The funny thing about December graduation at WVU, is that it takes place before the end of the semester. So even though I was pretty confident I had the grades to graduate, I didn’t know for sure. Anyway, here’s a picture of me and President Hardesty at graduation.

Later in the month we had Christmas with Treah’s parents. We spent most of our time in Beckley, but spent Christmas Day in Charleston at her grandfather’s house.

Now I’m stuck in the 3 day work week between the end of Christmas break and New Years. I’m hoping most of our troublesome users are out of work this week!

Mix in work, a couple days of school, football, basketball, a broken laptop battery, and you’ve basically got my life since my last post. I’ll try to do a better job keeping up.

I finished up the spring semester. I finished the semester with an A in Artificial Intelligence and a B in Software Reliability Engineering. I guess that means my programs are smart but are flakey.

I flew from Morgantown, WV to Burlington, VT for a long weekend. I did this to go see my little brother graduate. He almost has an MBA from Clarkson University. He has 3 credits left that he is working on right now by touring Europe for 3 weeks. Sounds rough. It was pretty funny, they gave him a diploma holder when he walked across the stage. Most people had a diploma in the holder, his said something like “You’ll get your diploma when you finish.” His friends were calling it an IOU.

This flight home taught me a valuable lesson, NEVER fly USAir. On the trip up every flight was delayed by at least an hour. I barely caught my connection in Philadelphia. I was supposed to be in Burlington around midnight. It was after 1:30am when I got off of the plane. Then to top off the evening they lost my bags. I didn’t get my bags back again until 6:00pm the following evening. Coming back to Morgantown, I went to check in at Burlington and my flight home was canceled. I was able to reschedule for a flight leaving later that day but it was still a hassle. The last leg of my flight from Pittsburgh to Morgantown I was the only person on the plane other than the 2 pilots. It was like having a private jet. The only bad part was they took me first to Clarksburg, WV to pick people up. When we got to Clarksburg no one was there to be picked up. It seemed as though they should have called ahead. Luckily USAir doesn’t fly out of Morgantown anymore. This weekend it switched to Continental. I hope they do a better job.

I’ve been working pretty much nonstop on the student portal upgrade at work. A co-worker who was the lead person from my group on the project left the university. So it is now my project. Chris and I spent most of last week trying to get stuff to work and to get support to actually answer our questions with relevant information. Next week we are in advanced Solaris 10 training so Jason gets to have fun with the project in our absence. I’m actually at work right now. I have been since about 7:00am this morning, on a Sunday. It’s our yearly fire suppression testing. We have to test to make sure our fire systems work. As a result we have to come in and shut everything down, test the fire system, then power everything back up. We’re also doing a bunch of updates as getting an outage is rare around here. We’re scheduled to have everything back up by 6:00pm this evening. I hope we’re done before then. I know what you’re asking yourself. Why am I blogging and not working so I can go home early. Our storage system takes about an hour to boot. Until that comes up we can’t do anything else. So I’m killing time right now.

I start my summer course next week. I only have 3 credits (1 course) left to take this summer then I’ll have my Master’s in Software Engineering. The course is in something like personal software development. The syllabus looks like it will be a lot of programming projects. So that should be fun. I’d much rather write a program than write a paper.

I think that’s it. I’ll try to do a better job with keeping this up to date. Sorry about that.

Assuming all goes well this week, I’ll only have 3 credits left to take in the summer and I’ll be done. It will be the first time I will only be enrolled in 1 class. Even in the summer sessions I took 2 classes at a time.

Actually, I’m wrong about that. I just remembered that in the summer between my Junior and Senior years of high school I took an economics course. This was to catch up from moving from into a new school district between my Freshman and Sophomore years. If I remember right I could have taken the course my senior year but I wouldn’t have been able to have taken senior study hall. Senior study hall was an important thing at Spartanburg High School, so I wasn’t going to miss that. Just imagine a room with couches, TV’s, a ping pong table, a laminated hall pass that gave you free reign of the school, and best of all NO teacher supervision.

So this will be my first time, other than that time, that I’ll have only been enrolled in 1 course.

I’ll be glad when Wednesday evening rolls around. Things will definitely get easier, and after August the Internet can be happy that there won’t be anymore posts with me complaining about school.

I know what you’re thinking. I have plenty of time to work on it now and get it done before the Super Bowl. This works in theory. Just one small problem. I am the biggest procrastinator ever when it comes to school work. I really should buy this poster:

So here’s my plan. Going to get one paper done this weekend. This gives me all next week and Saturday to get the other one done. I’ll keep you posted if this really happens.

Go Seattle.

WVU’s Software Engineering department has a real problem. So far in my 1.5 years in the program I have only had 2 professors that teaching is there primary job. 1 of them has since left the university, the other is retired from IBM and teaches 1 class per semester (he’s the guy I earned 555/600 this semester). The rest have day jobs and teaching is something they do for extra cash. This poses a big problem. The students get the shaft 90% of the time. Professors do not answer emails and do not return phone calls. Most of the time they aren’t even in WV, they are away on business trips. This means canceled classes. Even when classes are held attending them is nearly impossible with the “elearning” solution they have in place.

My second professor is no exception to this. He has yet to respond to any emails I have sent to him this semester. Last week he told us that we would have our final some time on Friday and would have until the following Friday to get it in to him. Well it’s now Sunday evening and no one in the class has received his final. Big shocker. He said in class last week that his travel schedule will have him out of the state next week and to communicate with him via email. I’ve already said how that works out.

This 2nd professor also sucks at spreading assignments out across the semester. We have had 1 homework assignment all semester. This was in the 2nd or 3rd week of class. We have also had a midterm exam. As I’ve already said we’re supposed to be getting a final some time. We also have a final project on top of this. Guess what? Both the final exam and the final project are due on the same day. Nothing like spreading things out for us. Luckily I’m already done with my other class.

My suggestions to the program.

1. Dump the elearning thing. Make this an on campus degree.
2. Dump the part time faculty members. Hire a 3 or 4 professors that only teach.
3. Get an advisor for the program that is worth a damn. Our current advisor acts as though he can’t be bothered to actually do his job. Even basic things like getting a list of classes to Admissions and Records is to difficult for this guy. This means that we can’t register for classes, because there are none in the system to register for.
4. Listen to your students.

To recap. WVU’s Software Engineering program sucks. Don’t go here! To put it bluntly, if I could finish my degree else where I would. It pains me to say this. I bleed gold and blue. My wife and I got our undergraduate degrees at WVU, I work for WVU, my wife is in Medical School at WVU. So needless to say WVU is a big part of my life, and yet I’d go elsewhere. Hopefully I can save some one considering this graduate program.