Hello Computer World: A Reflection

Chris Abel

College Advisory
Ms.Borsvold
May 16, 2016

Chris Abel
Advisory
Ms. Borsvold

16 May 2016
Hello Computer World: A Reflection
Computer science is a growing profession in the modern world and will only grow
more prominent as we proceed to become more technologically advanced. Through my
senior project, I took some of my first steps toward a bright future dealing with the
intricacies of computer hardware and software.
As of July 11th, 2016, I will be attending Kettering University, dual majoring in the
subjects of Computer Science and Computer Engineering. This project provided a great
way for me to test the waters of computer science and determine if it was a subject that
I was interested in doing for a living.
The mission of Arbor Prep is to prepare students for college educationally, this
project helped me to meet the mission statement of the school by allowing me to work
independently to learn a subject that meant a lot to me and determine what I wanted to
do in college. A major facet in college education is the shift of the responsibility, from
kindergarten through your senior year of high school, it is considered your teachers
responsibility to make sure that you learn the subjects that they teach, however, in
college, it is your responsibility to learn the professor is there as a benefactor if and only
if you are committed to learning. The senior projects in general are a great way to
prepare students for this by forcing them to choose a topic that they want to know more
about and making them research them independently and develop some kind of artifact
that displays their work and knowledge of the subject.
The overall process for my own project was rather simple, first I began by
researching the specifics of what I was planning to do, this meant finding information

about Microsoft Excel and learning how to write code in VBA (Visual Basic for
Applications).
In my own research, I made an effort to remove any kind of bias which, allowed
for less varied data, yielding a much more accurate and clear pool of resources for me
to utilize for my research such as Visual Basic for Applications Unleashed by Paul
McFedries, which contained information about the usefulness of Visual Basic for
Applications and even more information on how to write programs in the language,
however, due to its age, there were some functions that werent included in the text,
and, when encountered, I was able to go to an incredibly educational youtube channel
by the name of "ExcelVbaIsFun" which had comprehensive examples of how to make a
VBA program that would manipulate or use a spreadsheet to populate fields in a GUI or
even perform background operations. It is through researching while working that I was
able to ensure that my research reflected that which I didnt already know rather than
just showing that I was enforcing the knowledge and concepts that I already understood
and was able to use. My research backed up the knowledge I had already had with
more knowledge that I hadnt had, nor would have thought of, an example of such a
thing was that I thought Id need to write a whole separate module that I could call at a
later point in order to create a message box requesting the user to select yes or no in
response to a question, however, through research, I found that there was already a
messagebox object that could be used to do the task in a way that was much easier and
more efficient. It is this method of research that I forced myself to learn to use because
it helps to avoid the unnecessary restatement of that which is already known and
emphasizes on learning that which allows me to continue to grow my wealth of

knowledge. While I feel it is important to make sure to focus on the new, it is also
important to return to the known topics when there is free time because as people
continue to innovate, newer, more efficient, in terms of both power and memory,
methods of program execution are being found.
Through this project, I have found many things about myself that will need to be
fixed. First, I learned that I need to work on my planning skills, while I was able to stick
to a schedule, there were many times where unexpected occurrences resulted in high
stress situations, which, when paired with my responsibilities to my three AP classes,
caused a few problems. Second, after days of working on my project, I found myself
waking up later in the morning with less will to continue working on the project. In order
to fix these things, I had to take different steps, however, both fixes started the same
way, asking my parents for help. In order to help me get past the schedule problem, we
got a planner that could be used to plan out my day when I wake up, allowing for myself
to decide what would get done or get worked on, and for how long. In order to get past
my motivational issues, I found that forcing myself to get up at 6:00 AM allowed for me
to be more awake throughout the day and more motivated.
In order to further my skills in this subject area, I believe that I need to put more
effort into my education in mathematics, science, and computer science. This is
something that I have noticed from the very beginning of my time writing this program,
the mathematics that were required were nearly over my head and I was saved by my
mentor, a Senior Test Engineer at Ford Motor Company, who walked me through the
math step-by-step which provided a great chance for me to not only get to understand

what I needed to write the program to do, but also to gain a glimpse into his career and
decide whether or not I felt it was a career I was interested in.
Through this project, one of the hardest things for me to do was to get up and
present my slides for the class. I have never seen myself as a strong presenter, always
stuttering and tripping over my own words during the presentation, however, by
practicing the way that Id present, I was able to accurately portray the work put into my
project in laymens terms.
Overall, I felt that this project provided a great opportunity to learn more about my
intended career path and discover what kind of work Id be expected to put out. I got to
dive in, head first into a topic that interested me and I got to play with the building blocks
of code until I created a program, that when run, provides accurate results in a
drastically shorter time than if the work of the program were done by hand.