Wesley Reed | Year-In-Review

What specific experiences in the past year have had the most impact on your personal and professional trajectory?

The biggest experience I have had in the last year has been working at the UC IT Solutions Center (ITSC). I was fortunate to be one of ten incoming students to be offered a developer position at the Solutions Center in the fall. I continued part time in the spring and was offered a Co-Op there for this summer. I have learned more in my time there than in my classes this first year, both academically and professionally. Coming into the position I had no experience with the coding language or frameworks used in the applications developed by ITSC. In the fall, my boss helped push me to self-teach myself JavaScript, ExpressJS, AngularJS, and several other libraries that are needed to work on the applications with very limited help from my co-workers. The whole process took me most of the semester, but I learned a very valuable lesson on how to push through and understand new and difficult material and I believe in the future I will be able to teach myself new coding techniques in less time because of this experience.

Also, through my work at the ITSC, I have been given significant exposure to the client relations side of developing an application. In addition to developing, I am responsible for progress updates, application deployments (which are either in-person or via WebEx), answering client questions, defining new features, and several other things that require client interaction. With the help of my bosses, I have learned a lot about crafting professional emails and how much information to share with the client at a time. Too much information, and you run the risk of the client skipping over something important or confusing different points. In the future my experience interacting with clients will make me more marketable to employers, since most developers do not have client relations experience.

Finally, my time with the UC band has taught me a lot about enjoying life. At my high school, band was a highly competitive activity at every level. In marching band, we competed against other marching bands for trophies and bragging rights. In concert and jazz band, we competed against other members of our instrument section for first chair, as well as the OMEA (Ohio Music Education Association) “standards” to achieve a superior rating at contest. Here at UC, the band is a lot more focused on enjoying the activity than being the best. There is still some light competition for chair placement and to be better than the band that came before us, but the atmosphere is significantly more laid back that what I’m used to from high school. At first, this frustrated me because I was used to always being pushed for excellence and felt like the extra space in rehearsals was getting in the way of that. Over time, however, I have learned that band is not just about being the best, but about making friends and enjoying the music. And even though the UC directors aren’t pushing us as hard as my high school directors, as we like to say in the band, The UC Band is Damn Good (TUCBIDG).

Articulate specific personal and/or professional goals for the next year.

In the next year I hope to:

• Make some new friends of campus
• Eat healthier
• Complete the current version of the client application at work and plan the next version
• Have fun with the UC band
• Take more challenging classes