Senior Year Preview: My Fall Semester

Hey everyone – welcome back!

I’m so excited to be back at USC after a wonderful summer interning in the San Francisco Bay Area. You can read about my summer experiences here. This blog is going to be a preview of this semester. I have a lot to look forward to: I’m starting my senior year, and I definitely want to make it count!

Me and a bunch of my floormates freshman year. I can’t believe I’m already a senior!

This semester I’m taking a variety of classes in Industrial & Systems Engineering, Information Technology, and elective “just-for-fun” courses. You can read about them below:

ISE 495ax – Senior Project Design

In ISE, our senior project design course is a year-long team-based design experience, where students complete improvement-related projects for a client based on the knowledge and skills we have acquired in previous course work. I haven’t found out my client yet, but some examples include Amazon, American Apparel, The Aerospace Corporation, DHL, and many other notable companies. I’m really excited to find out what client I will be working with this year! More to come in a future blog.

ISE 410 – Planning and Scheduling

This course focuses on production planning, forecasting, scheduling, and inventory. We will also be covering computer integrated decision systems in analysis and the control of production systems. I took the first part of this class last semester, so I’m looking forward to getting into more depth on these topics.

ISE 435 – Discrete Systems Simulation

In this class I will learn model design to simulate discrete event systems with basic input and output analysis using high order languages. We will apply these simulations to industrial systems analysis and design problems.

ITP 482 – Engineering Database Applications

Engineering Database Applications focuses on the planning and implementation of engineering information systems that interface with a large database – particularly web-based data entry and retrieval. This class is fun because it only consists of seniors in my emphasis of my major, so I pretty much know everyone in the class.

ITP 487 – Data Warehouses and Business Intelligence

This courses involves rigorous modeling process leading from data to decisions, and explores the theory and practice of Data Warehouses. This class serves as an ITP (Information Technology Program) elective for me, so I got to choose it from a list of several other options.

MUSC 423 – Classic Rock: Popular Music of the Sixties and Seventies

This music class is an elective that I’m taking just for fun! It is a critical examination of the lyrics, structure, and evolving styles of popular music which reflected the turbulent societal changes during the 1960s and 1970s.

OT 220 – Lifestyle Design: Introduction to Occupational Therapy

I’m also taking this introductory Occupational Therapy course, which will discuss concepts concerning the relationship of engagement in activities (occupations) to health and well being. I’m taking this one because I was told by several friends that it was fun, interesting, and very thought-provoking.

So those are my classes this semester! I will be very busy between classes, the start of football season this week (YAY!), and my other on-campus involvements. More on my campus involvements in the next blog.