First Semester of Project

Throughout this semester, I began with the thought of doing my project on Information Technology, specifically helping people and clients who had computer issues. It seemed to be specific enough and has worked the first half of the semester, but recently with the finalizing of the essential questions and finally finding a mentor with years of experience in the field of information technology, it has completely changed my narrow perspective on the world of IT. My mentor, Gregory Carlton, who is a professor at CalPoly Pomona, has explained to me how specific I am being and how IT is so much larger and encompasses so much more than what I am focusing on, that it really won't help me in the future to simply learn about one of the smallest sections of the field. It would be much better for my senior project to be a focus on the many different fields and career paths possible in order for me to not go into college thinking IT is just the people who go to help people at home with computers, which will probably result in choosing the wrong major and classes since it is broken up into many sections within colleges. He has said how many students have had this issue due to their high schools always encompassing everything under "computer sciences" when colleges split each section up into its components.

However, because of the structure of the senior project, I have been unable to focus on a more broad scale than what I would have liked, and have instead had to narrow my essential question (which was more done by the teachers than myself, which was a major dislike of mine) down to simply how to provide computer support to a small business. Adding the small business portion at the end was my victory and only choice in how the essential question was finalized, and will definitely help broaden my project a bit as well in the final product. Unfortunately, I won't be able to focus on all the different parts of IT such as programming, engineering, etc. but I can definitely see how the senior project has to be so narrow and structured to prevent a great many issues from arising. 

What I have learned is that the senior project itself really isn't going to be as difficult as I thought, and definitely not as important after realizing how structured it is, but really, the best part of the project is going to be the mentorship aspect, which really does seem to be the most major freedom next to actually choosing a topic in the beginning of the year. Without it I would've gone blindly through the year without knowing the important things to watch out for when choosing a possible major in this field, and probably waste money and time going into the smallest aspect of the IT world when the business side seems to be much more interesting than the at home calls and support aspect.