Cinderella’s Closet Application

Wesley Reed | Honors Experiences

Starting unofficially in June of 2021, I have been working with a local non-profit called Cinderella’s Closet to build an application to help them track event scheduling and inventory management. Cinderella’s Closet Cincinnati is a nonprofit organization in Cincinnati, Ohio that works with junior and senior high school girls (or princesses) who are unable to attend their high school prom because they need a dress, shoes, and other items. Cinderella’s Closet encourages high school girls to recognize their beauty and value by providing a unique prom shopping experience.

Due to the amount of work this project entails, I formed a team with Ben Romig and Trent McGinnis and we registered the idea as our senior capstone project with the university. The university assigned Dyllon Dekok to be our faculty advisor for the project. This project exceeds the expectations of our senior capstone requirement because we set our own timeline to have the application completed by the beginning of February 2022 so that Cinderella’s Closet could use it for the 2022 prom shopping season.

With much effort and an early start, the team was able to deliver the event scheduling features by the February deadline and then added inventory management in a subsequent release in early March. However, the project is far from over and we are planning to continue maintaining the project and adding new features past graduation.

Throughout the experience, I served as the project manager and our liaison to Cinderella’s Closet. This means I’ve been responsible for keeping the client informed our our progress, receiving and processing bug reports and feature requests, and keeping our task board up to date and in priority order. Early on I made the mistake of putting tasks on the board that were far too broad and it caused tasks to take a very long time and created many blocking tasks. As the project progressed, I learned how to break larger pieces down into more manageable tasks so that they could be completed within the boundary of our two-week sprints.

Click here to view our presentation on the ITEXPO Website

Click here to view our final report published in the UC library (coming soon)

Click here to view the documents written during the experience

Robotics Mentorship (2022 Season)

Wesley Reed | Honors Experiences

This season was a tough one for our team. Due to COVID-19, FIRST chose not to hold a normal competition season in 2021 which means that most of our current students have never experiences a full build season and constructed/coded a robot from start to finish. Because of this, we spent a lot of extra time training this year. We also ended up behind on the construction of the robot causing the controls team to do most of their testing throughout our first competition of the season.

In spite of the challenges, the team has had lots of fun this season collaborating on the robot and interacting with the other teams at competition. We’ve learned a lot as a team and are ready to go into our second competition this weekend with lots of improvements to our robot and regardless of how we do, I am confident we’ll have fun. There’s no place like a FIRST Robotics Competition!

Click here to view the reflections written during the experience

Click here to view the code for our 2022 robot: Bobarazzi

Robotics Mentorship (2020 Season)

Wesley Reed | Honors Experiences

This year, I decided to return to my high school robotics team as a mentor so I could help give back to the team. I had an amazing experience with the team when I was a student, and I wanted to make sure that others could have that same opportunity.

At the beginning of this season, our mentor Paul George passed away after a long battle with cancer, which was very hard on our team. Paul was affectionately referred to by the team as “Dad” and we call our other team leader Jimmy, “Mom” because of how they interacted together and because we consider the whole team to be a family. In his memory, we named this year’s robot after him.

On top of this, our season was cut short by COVID-19 and we only got to compete at one event. We did very well at the event and even won an award for having the most aesthetically pleasing robot! I also had lots of fun being a referee for the matches, making sure every match was fair and properly scored.

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Despite the season being cut short, we were still able to use our resources and knowledge to impact our community. The team tasked our 3D printers to turn out mask “Ear Savers” for the teachers in our school district, which got featured on the local news!

We were also able to participate in the AndyMark Robot Fight Night where students make robots out of cardboard and plastic to fight in a friendly competition. While fighting isn’t directly in the mission of FIRST robotics, this event is very well put together and everyone still feels the values of FIRST throughout the competition.

Click here to view the reflections written during the experience

Click here to view the code for our 2020 robot: Bampás

IT Accelerated Program, 2019 Study Tour

Wesley Reed | Honors Experiences

This past December, I was offered a great opportunity to travel to San Francisco, California to visit with several companies. We visited Macy’s Technology, Cisco, Intuit, Google, Splunk and Trōv. Of all of the companies we visited, I enjoyed Cisco and Google the most. What really set Cisco and Google apart was they seemed less interested in marketing their company to us and getting us to come work for them, and more interested in developing us as professionals.

At Cisco, we had a panel discussion with several recent hires and speed mentoring sessions with four different individuals who have been at Cisco for many years. Throughout these discussions we talked a lot about what it’s like to apply for a job, how to impress a recruiter, how to make sure you represent your personal brand in the best way possible, talked about some tips for performing in your job after you’re hired. These discussions were very informative and answered a lot of questions I had about what comes next after college, and some I didn’t even know I had. That being said, I do wish there would have been a little bit of “here’s why you should come work at Cisco” in the conversation.

At Google, we did talk a little about the programs Google offers for their employees, but most memorable part of the experience was when one of the people hosting us took us through several mock interview questions to help prepare us for future interviews with any company. Google struck a nice balance of “here’s why you should come work at Google” and giving us tips on how to interview even if we don’t choose to apply to Google.

Intuit’s presentation was very focused on what Intuit does as a company, and what benefits they offer to their employees. It was really cool to see all of the things that they are working on and to hear what they value as a company. They spoke a lot about work/life balance and how the company values the time employees spend outside of work, both recreationally and helping the community. Like Google and Cisco, it was great to hear that they value us as individuals and want to make sure we are growing professionally.

Both Macy’s Technology and Splunk seemed a little unprepared to host us. Macy’s Technology had a recruiter speak to us for about 20 minutes, walked us around their rooftop space and one floor of the building, then sent us on our way. Overall, not a very impressive experience. Similarly, Splunk gave us a short walk about a floor of the building and let us have a panel discussion with a few employees who didn’t have any talking points prepared and seemed surprised when we didn’t really know how to get the conversation started.

The last company we visited, Trōv, was very unique because it is a small startup company. Our host there talked about what it is the company does, and how they are utilizing modern technology such as Azure DevOps to enhance their product and delivery of their product. It was very cool to see how tools we are learning about in our classes are being applied in the real world. We also got to speak with the CEO of Trōv about being an entrepreneur and coming up with an idea, then making that idea a reality and marketing it.

In addition to visiting the companies, we also had lots of time to explore the bay area and visit tourist attractions such as the Computer History Museum, the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz, Muir Woods, the Intuit Museum, the San Francisco Cable Car Museum, and many other places.

View my notes from the companies here

FAM 3097 – Music & Architecture

Wesley Reed | Honors Experiences

I decided to join this course because I have a passion for music and I was curious to explore how architecture and music are related. Before this course, I had never given much thought to architecture so the information in this course really opened my eyes to the world of architecture. I have noticed many new details about the buildings and landscape around me on campus as a result of this course, giving me some really cool conversation points when talking with my friends around campus. I learned a lot about architectural terminology from this course and was very surprised to find that many of the terms are shared between music and architecture, while meaning slightly different things (e.x. rhythm, pattern, mood, interval).

The course involved a nice mixture of lecture, student presentations, videos, and architectural tours. We got to tour CCM, DAAP, and the campus. One of the coolest parts was getting to hear music played in each of CCM’s performance halls during the lecture on how architecture is built for music. It was also very interesting seeing what material students used in their presentations because everyone brought a unique perspective to the very open-ended prompts we were given.

Link to coursework

FAM3097 Documents on OneDrive