Hi everyone!

I hope you’re all ready for the upcoming week. It’s going to be a busy one for me – my first midterm of the semester is coming up on Thursday in Physics 152: Electricity and Magnetism — yikes. On the bright side, I’m so excited for next weekend: we’re playing Oregon State in football! Now in case you don’t remember, I’m from Portland, Oregon, so a lot of my friends go to Oregon State which means I really want to beat them. A lot. Also I went back to Oregon for the OSU for the football game last year so I’m quite excited to watch my Trojans triumph again! You can read about my experiences at last year’s USC/OSU game here.

But anyways, this blog isn’t about football. Today I’m going to talk about one of my favorite classes this semester: DSO 435, Enterprise Data Architecture. The class is generally focused on the management of enterprise data architecture including data structures, conceptual data modeling, logical data modeling, structured query language (SQL), and physical optimization of high performance data architecture. Now as I mentioned in my last blog, one of the coolest things about DSO 435 is that we’re working on a semester-long team project, where we will actually be building a database for a real company.

To be honest, I never really loved group projects in high school. However, in college, that’s totally changed – I now think group projects are some of the most helpful real-world experiences that I get in the classroom. I enjoy hands-on projects (which is why I chose engineering rather than a “hard science” major) and I think this database project will definitely give me lots of practice. Also, my professor is great. He’s been teaching the class for awhile, and he clearly knows which parts of the textbook and course material are harder for students to conceptualize, so he spends extra time explaining more complex topics, and gives lots of helpful examples. 

Basically, this class has all the makings of a wonderful class: terrific professor, applied learning, small class size, and interesting subject matter. I’m really looking forward to getting deeper into the group project, which I’m sure I’ll blog about later in the semester. 

Until next time!

Juliana 

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juliana-2016

juliana-2016

Industrial & Systems Engineering, Class of 2016, Learn more on her profile here!