School Projects…

Why does this chapter exist?

Why not write each school project into its own page?

Well, I thought about writing one page per school project, but I think it’s not worth the energy (I’m lazy)…

Even though my university is one of the most prestigious in Mexico, it has not been living up to expectations in the Computer Science degree. Tecnológico de Monterrey is one of the best universities in Latin America if you study business or want to create a career in entrepreneurship. But this has affected the computer science degree, which has turned us, students, more into entrepreneur developers and not completely like a true engineer.

Don’t get me wrong, excellent computer science graduates from this university have made an impact on MAANG, have created amazing startups, and we have some cool projects, but in my case, I don’t feel that proud in boasting about them.

So this page will discuss in a general manner my experience with my school projects, how they were, the value from them, and some examples.

What were my school projects?

My school projects are based on solving a problem that could or is present in the industry or world. They are called Retos, which translates to “challenges”. These challenges could be situations from around the world, like helping traffic, detecting malaria, creating a smart cup, etc. Or, these challenges could be situations from “training partners” (socio formadores in Spanish).

At the start of each course, usually in the first week, they present to us our partner or our situation to “fix” or find a solution during 5, 10, or 15 weeks. At the end of the course, we present our project (or solution) to the company or professors.

With our training partner “Netica”, on my last semester

Some school projects

In my fourth semester, my team and I worked with IJALTI. IJALTI in Spanish means Instituto Jalisciense de Tecnologías de la Información, they are a non-profit organization with the main goal of promoting and boosting the use, development, and exploitation of computer technologies. The situation was to create a web platform or website for a job board for IJALTI.

Frame from a demo video of our website

In my fifth semester, we worked with El Banco de Alimentos de México (BAMX). BAMX is a non-profit social organization that focuses on rescuing food and delivering it to families, communities, and institutions. Our challenge was to create a mobile application that helped people organize and create strategic places to salvage food.

Slide from our final presentation, showing frames of our app

In my sixth semester, we worked with IBM, and the challenge was to create a “dashboard” that could manage and visualize data from Excel files.

Slide from our final presentation, showing the home page of our website

What is valuable from my school projects?

Apart from gaining knowledge and experience in developing web and mobile applications, we practiced direct communication with the training partners. We always start by soliciting requirements for our project. We also have constant feedback on our work, and we have Q&A sessions. By the end of the course, we do a formal presentation of our solutions to the training partners.

A final presentation for our training partner IBM

What was my role in my teams?

Because web or mobile development has never been a passion of mine, I was doing the minimum when it came to writing code and working with technology stacks. But I always had the mentality to help in everything I could, and I promised to be part of the development of projects, and that sometimes meant doing some peer programming.

Mostly, I took care of project management, documentation, and creating presentations and documents that were homework or school-related deadlines. I enjoy how to organize and manage a project, so I kept track of our progress and obstacles. I helped with the deadlines for homework and work related to the school deliverables, which meant documenting our project and making texts presentable for our training partner.

README.md of a private repository