A Year in Review 2020-21

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). They have been gracious enough to bring me on as a graduate assistant to help with my tuition costs, and I continue to learn more there than in my classes.

I am now the lead developer on multiple projects, as well as being in charge of server maintenance and administration, development operations, office administration, and some client relations.

As I mentioned last year, now that I have become a project lead at ITSC part of my responsibilities are to delegate tasks to the other people on the project and trust that they will get the job done. I continue to struggle with delegation because I like to own what I’m delivering and see to it personally. Every time I delegate a task, part of me worries that it might not get done, it might not get done to the level of quality that I hold myself to, or it might take longer than if I were to do it and in many cases it does take longer. I’ve been working a lot with my supervisor to overcome this, and know how to delegate and hold others accountable for their work.

Due to the Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19), I was forced to work from home for a significant portion of the year. This experience was very interesting, however at the end of it I was very ready to return to the office. Moving forward, I don’t think I would want to work from home for extended periods of time because my brain needs the physical separation of work and home so that it can stop working when work is over. Throughout this season I found myself continuing to work late into the evening or thinking about work while I was doing other things. I also enjoy the environment of being in an office and interacting with my coworkers.

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

In the next year I hope to:

• Complete senior design and deliver a high quality application to our client
• Have fun with the UC band
• Graduate with my bachelors and masters degree

A Year in Review 2019-20

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). They have been gracious enough to keep me on for the last 3 semesters, and I continue to learn more there than in my classes. Since I am now one of the more senior developers at ITSC, I continue to be given more and more responsibility. In addition to being the lead developer on my original project, my responsibilities now include server maintenance and administration, development operations, office administrator, client relations, and I have designed several proof-of-concept applications for potential clients.

Now that I have become a project lead at ITSC, part of my responsibilities are to delegate tasks to the other people on the project and trust that they will get the job done. Learning to delegate tasks has been a struggle for me this year, because I like to own what I’m delivering and see to it personally. Every time I delegate a task, part of me worries that it might not get done, it might not get done to the level of quality that I hold myself to, or it might take longer than if I were to do it. I’ve been working a lot with my supervisor to overcome this, and know how to delegate and hold others accountable for their work.

This year, I worked with my high school robotics team as a mentor. Although it was cut short due to the Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19), we had a lot of fun this season. It was really cool being on the montor side and being able to guid the next generation of robotics students. Instead of stressing constantly about getting the code perfect for the robot, I was able to sit back and look at all of the different projects going on during the build season and offer my help in several different areas (including the code). I definitely learned a lot about being a leader from this experience, and I was able to do several side projects that helped me learn about maintaining a Windows Active Directory server, creating printed circuit boards, soldering surface chips, and much more.

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

In the next year I hope to:

• Make some new friends of campus
• Complete the current version of the client application at work and plan the next version
• Have fun with the UC band
• Take on the challenge of my MSIT courses

A Year In Review 2018-19

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