Joshua Mihai

Senior Seminar

Ms. Terry and Ms. Marsh

3/12/20

Senior Project Reflection

I had an interesting experience with my project, to say the least. It all started with my

internship, where I brainstormed ideas on what I should do for my senior project. I started by

getting some ideas from James, who was the mentor for my internship. This led me to my

driving question: “How can I improve the tech situation at KCS, while keeping the school safe?”.

The question lead me in many directions, but all directions lead to the same, positive result of

achieving the goals set by my senior project (Cleaning out the electrical closets, cleaning out

Phils office, getting new Windows 10 images, and setting up new servers).

The project stretched me in many ways, with each way teaching me various life lessons. I

entered this project with the fixed mindset of trying to help the school achieve max efficiency

with the tech situation, but I achieved a growth mindset of: wishing to learn as much as possible

in order to help as much as possible.

The greatest skills that I learned from this project was networking and wiring, as I learned

how to set up servers, along with how to pull wires through walls and ceilings. Both of those

skills will help me on my way to building up a career. A skill that I greatly improved was

communication, since I ended up keeping a healthy amount of contact between the

administration and the IT staff, which lead to a very smooth timeline for our operations.
 While I didn’t gain a lot of material from this project (since that wasn’t the goal), I ended

up gaining a lot more knowledge than I initially expected. As I have previously stated, I gained

the knowledge of how to pull wires and set up servers, on top of other aspects of

networking/wiring. Even though the server side of my learning was a grueling process, it was

extremely helpful in teaching me about the important parts of networking.

Complications are bound to happen, and of course, it happened to my project. While most

of the process was smooth when we were actually working on the project, there were various

hiccups in between the planned work sessions. Due to the staff limitations of the school, James

and Phil would be pulled away for other tasks, mainly during 3rd to 5th period. That put a severe

limitation on our timing, which forced us to designate 1st and 2nd period for work sessions. Bu

even then, there would be certain days where James and Phil were pulled for the entirety of the

day, which put a significant crunch on the work that could be done. We still ended up getting the

essentials done, mainly by putting in extra effort during the limited amount of time that we had.

Due to my interest in technology and networking, I will definitely be applying what I

learned from this project to my future career. All lessons that I learned, from communication to

networking, will be key in forming my career. Without those lessons, I wouldn’t have been able

to complete my project on time, nor would I even know what I’m truly interested in.