“And presenting his findings on the effects of senior projects on rising college students is Mr. Mattastical Matt himself!”
*imaginary clapping*
Ahem… Senior projects are long, annoying, and stressful. But they are necessary for the development of individuals.
*cricket chirping*
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk!
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Completing my senior project was… a unique experience to say the least. I don’t know if other high schools even HAD a senior project. Like I’ve said in this blog before, my high school worked differently from others. And none of my friends from college
If you haven't read my Computer Engineering post, I went to a technical high school. This meant that a fourth of my courses were in a specific career field (called shops). During Senior year, you had to do a major project based on something you learned in those shop classes. You started off picking a specific topic you were interested in, then doing some research on it. You then wrote a paper, created a power point presentation, and made a “product” to present what you learned about your topic.
A “product” is exactly what you think it would be. Based on the topic, you create something that could be used in a real world scenario. It could be something physical, a virtual application, a website, or some sort of class/training. I have no idea how to explain that better.
I guess a better thing to do is give the example of my project. Since I was in the Computer Engineering shop, I decided to focus my attention on malware. Ya know, those malicious programs you find on the internet? “You won a free iPad. Click here to claim it!”
More specifically, I presented my project on the different types of malware, how they worked, and what to do when you come across malicious programs. For my “product,” I wrote a program in the Java programming language that simulated how a real anti-malware application works.
The process of doing this project is very long and exhausting. It begins during the last couple months of Junior year and lasts all the way to the week before Christmas break. It’s not a good feeling to have the project weighing down on your conscience for that long. Do you know how frustrating it is to have fun at the beach on summer vacation when the thought of, “You could be working on your project,” comes up in your head?
It starts with your proposal, that's what all the preparation in Junior year is for. You basically have to fill out a form and outline what exactly you plan on presenting come Winter. They make you write out questions that you expect your presentation to answer. Which is fine, there should be some questions that guide the development of your project. But they make you write so many that they eventually become trivial to the final project. Why does it need to answer like ten questions? Are they really keeping track of what I do and don’t answer? Just be satisfied with what it is.
In this phase, you also have to decide whether you want to do a senior project or a “Masters of Technical Diploma,” (MTD for short). An MTD is basically a more advanced senior project. Longer paper, longer power point, longer presentation, and a more advanced product. Being the overachiever I am, I went with the MTD. They also give you a free breakfast for choosing the MTD, which was all the incentive I needed.
The next step was the paper. This was probably the worst part of the entire project. First, everyone had to write at least six pages worth of content. Ten if you were doing an MTD (like me). Talking about malware gets pretty boring after just five pages, trust me. Second, the paper is pretty meaningless in the large scale of the project. You never have to present it or anything, it merely exists as a grade.
I guess the purpose is to show the teachers you did a lot of research and know what you are talking about. But a lot of the information you put in that paper will most likely never come up again. “The concept of malware first came up in 1949 by computer scientist John von Neumann.” No one cares, it’s a meaningless fact that you will certainly forget before finishing this blog post.
The paper was also difficult for me personally. You see, typically you have an English teacher that looks over your proposal, paper, and presentation as you go through the process. Unfortunately, our English teacher retired over the summer, so we didn’t have anyone for the first couple weeks of senior year. When they did find someone, we had to meet her once a week in some computer lab I’d never been to before. And this was her first time supervising senior projects, so we were all learning how to do this together. Long story short, she wasn’t the most helpful human being.
We also had to include a ton of references. I think ten was the minimum. What always boggled my mind though was my best friend using himself as a reference. My friend did a science fair project on something similar to what his senior project was about. And somehow, he got away with referencing his own project in his paper. How does that work? “Well, I’m not sure about this fact, but you do reference yourself. You seem like a credible source, so I’ll allow it. Now, this next sentence uses Wikipedia as a source, UNACCEPTABLE!”
So once the paper from hell was finished, the next step was the power point. There’s not much to say about this. The typical power point was about 30-40 slides and you basically had to present your research and product. There's a lot of rules and stuff you have to follow, but none of that makes for an interesting blog post.
I do remember the beginning of my power point. I had a picture of a website with a ton of download links on it and asked my audience in the presentation to identify the real download
button.
There’s not much else to that, I just wanted to say how proud I was of it.
Next comes the product. Like I said, I chose to write Java programs to simulate how Anti-malware works and deals with files it thinks may be dangerous. It started by scanning through three files to see if they contained my predefined “malicious code.” It then asks the user if it wants to delete the file(s), move the file to a “quarantined” folder, or just do nothing if it finds the code. And then I wrote side programs that close certain applications when they are opened. Sounds cool right?
The problem with this was that I didn’t know anything about programming when I proposed the idea. I didn’t even know how to print “Hello World!” to the screen, the most basic thing to do in Computer Science. I was taking an AP Computer Science course in Java at the time, so I had to simultaneously learn the content and apply it to my project. As you can guess, it was stressful.
I remember spending at least 20 hours writing all of the code for my product. And there was a ton of trial and error. I had to scrap quite a few ideas and start from scratch. I remember once my program had 70 errors in it, which is never a pretty thing to look at. I enlisted my dad, the software engineer, to help me out with it. It took us an hour to figure out one line of code was creating all those problems. Funny right? But upon completion, my program worked the way I intended. I was very proud of what I had accomplished.
If only that was it. I still had to present all of this to my teachers. I remember practicing my presentation over and over again with my parents. After every run through, they would give me notes on how I could do better and what they thought I could change. It was also Christmas time when I started practicing, so I had to present right next to a decorated tree each practice round. By the time the big day came, I was already sick of presenting the material.
The 24 hours before my presentation were some of the most stressful of my life. I remember having to force myself to go to sleep, struggling with all the panic going through my head. Putting on my suit and tie in the morning felt more like I was putting on my army uniform before being shipped out. The entire day leading up to it, I was pacing around, going through the presentation over and over in my head. Like a spotify song on repeat.
The moment finally came where I had to present my senior project (MTD), to my shop teacher, my English teacher, three other teachers that were pre-selected, my parents, my friends, and my school's principal. On top of all that, my shop teacher also invited a few of his former students to watch my presentation as well. For 45 minutes in a suit and tie. Super Bowl players don’t feel this much pressure.
In the end, the presentation went very well. All that practice turned presenting the material into second nature for me. I even had this awesome recovery when I started presenting the wrong material and had to transition to the right stuff. You had to be there.
Afterwards, I had to answer the audience’s questions. I got bombarded, it was literally 20 questions. Half of them came from the former students in an attempt to see if I would slip up. Well I didn’t you assholes! Your plans have been foiled! None of my other friends got asked nearly as many questions as I did for their projects.
The teachers went into a private room to discuss my grade and invited me in when they were ready. Watching them in the war room was like watching a jury decide my fate. “We should have him hang!” “No, he is innocent, he deserves freedom!”
I ended up getting a 95 on the presentation and a 100 on the product, which I can live with.
Looking back, the senior project wasn’t that bad of an experience. At the moment it was tough, and a lot of us were just about ready to die. But we all ended up learning a lot of skills for the future from it. I learned how to write programs to manipulate other files. I learned how to write college-level papers (sorta).
But above all, I learned how to give a major presentation with a big audience. Which is an important life skill. A lot of businesses nowadays expect you to present major projects just like that. Learning from a younger age prepares you for what the job force may throw at you. Plus, those skills were very useful for when I gave my salutatorian speech. That’s a post for another day though. Until then, stay Matt-astic!
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