20 April 2012

Week 14: Project Ends

I made it! Doing my capstone was the one thing about the iSchool program that interested and terrified me at the same time. I am so glad there is the "professional project" option but since I work full-time, I was afraid there would be no good way to accomplish this requirement. Thankfully, I was able to get permission to do my capstone at my place of work and for a different department where I have a real interest in what they are doing. I still can't believe another 14 weeks have gone by and all that I have accomplished in the 125 hours of the project. What I have ended up with is not at all what I envisioned going in; it really is so much more, a much more well-rounded and complete project than what I scoped out initially.

This week was spent tying up loose ends so that I could turn the project in. I finished getting the last bits of data (mostly participant quotes) into my presentation slides and then adding the little touches like animated annotations to my designs and a nifty "play" button overlay for the three video clips I included. I also learned how to export my speaker notes so I can see them during the presentation, though I don't like they way they work exactly. It makes you print out one page per slide with notes below, whether there are notes for that slide or not. Well I have 45 slides and many don't have notes so I will find a way to remove the blank slides at least!

I tried to keep my slides clean, interesting and with few words, the exception being the slides with participant quotes because I do plan to read those word for word and want the audience to be able to follow along. I decided last minute to move the position of the quantitative scorecard from the end of the Results section to the beginning, my reasoning being that seeing the snapshot overview first and then going into detail around each of the key metrics would probably keep their attention more. I know if I just saw chart after chart of data without knowing what it was leading up to, I would get bored. At least this way they know the final scores first and then are shown a breakdown of the data.

That being said, here's a PDF version (sans videos) of my final project deliverable: WEM v.8.2 Pickers

There's a neat feature when you export to PDF from PowerPoint where it can also export the speaker notes into the PDF as a layer that can be toggled on and off so my speaker notes are also included.

Well, this certainly isn't the "end" quite yet; there is still the matter of my capstone poster which I will have ready next week as well as presenting that poster in two weeks. It all feels a little surreal right now. I've been having sleep issues this week even though I am not worried about getting all my work done or anything; I think it's just that change is impending. I'll no longer be a student in a few weeks and I'll have all this free time again. The first thing I'll be doing after graduating is going back to Alaska for another road trip, but beyond that is a great unknown. Maybe I'm afraid nothing will actually change.

Me at the Arctic Circle in Alaska, May 2012

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