My experience for entrepreneurship was to take IS 448 (Markup and Scripting Languages). This course had a semester long project that was worth 20% of the grade. We had to view the project from an entrepreneurial perspective in that each team of students was treated as start-up company. The project itself consisted of making a web portal using html, php, and JavaScript. As health informatics continues to move online, learning how to create the infrastructure for displaying different kinds of data is a must. This experience was the equivalent of 3 credit hours because it is a class offered at umbc, it was completed Spring 2020

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This experience found itself on a nice middle ground in terms of connection to advances in health informatics. As we strive towards a more connected future, health informatics is all going to be online. This experience required us to design and implement a web-based application. I now possess the tools create and evaluate potential web-based alternatives for methods of healthcare. This experience also forced me to work in a multi-disciplinary team with people from many different backgrounds. Advancing health informatics is a team effort so all of the teamwork and experience I got through this course will keep me prepared for many different future situations.

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This experience contributed towards many of the GCSP learning objectives. These learning objectives included integrity, perspectivism, realistic vision, teamwork, persistence, and flexibility. For integrity, working on anything that requires teamwork integrity is crucial to being successful. Every team member had different responsibilities and beliefs and tried to operate in
accordance to them at the highest standard possible. For perspectivism, my project team contained a lot of people from different levels of programming experience. Fortunately, this meant that everyone brought a different set of skills and beliefs to our team. This allowed me to observe and learn not only from my own experiences but from my team’s as well.
For realistic vision,  at the beginning of the semester we were tasked with coming up with an idea to create a web-based application. There were a lot of ideas that would have been very interesting to use but we were constrained by time, and we needed to be realistic about what skills we possessed as a team. This evaluation process contributed heavily to providing realistic vision. For teamwork, the core of this experience was a group project. This means that we needed to work together as a team to reach an end goal. Through the process we had to learn to trust each
other, while being constructive and critical at the same time. We established early on that we would only be as strong as our weakest link.
For persistence,  anytime a programming project is involved there will need to be persistence involved if the project is going to be completed successfully. This project incorporated many new programming languages to most of my team so there were plenty of growing pains. We embraced these growing pains as learning opportunities, and I believe we will all walk out of this experience as better developers. For flexibility, our project was broken into 6 deliverables. Each deliverable was submitted and then
returned for feedback. There were a couple of situations where we implemented something in a way that didn’t meet expectations. Whenever this happens in a software project it can mess up any scheduling or planning involved because it sets the team back and might require a shift in
direction. There were a couple times when we had to scrap our initial plan and go in completely opposite direction. Flexibility was crucial to our success.

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A point to be made is that this experience is being completed during the COVID-19 pandemic. From the completion of this experience I have learned how difficult it is to work on a software project during distance
learning. I learned how important it is for myself to trust others in a group project when you can’t manage them in person. I was elected at the lead programmer of our group project, so I oversaw making sure everyone completed their programming tasks on time. I had a lot of sleepless nights worrying about whether my team would be able to handle the various items
that needed to be completed without being able to all interact together not virtually. For the first time in my life I felt like I was truly just a cog in the big picture. This was a great perspective shift for me because I tend to micromanage those that I am working with. As the semester went
on, I began to put more trust in my team and my confidence in our team drastically improved. In turn in addition to my productivity increasing because I had less to worry about, so did my teams. I will be going into a software engineering career out of college, and with that there will
be opportunities to work on teams through a virtual medium. This experience will define how I operate in these kinds of situations in the future. I became a better team member, and I will focus on building trust in all my teams very early on in the process.