Philip Casley
My personal experience taking on this project for Barnes and Noble College bookstore #240 has been a very
exciting experience. My time management skills, critical thinking skills, and problem solving skills all got
tested to their highest levels while working on this project. I can honestly say this is one of the most
challenging things I’ve ever had to do. The project we had to do was create a database to store the large
number of students who would reserve their textbooks at orientation. Then we had to sync up to the Registrar’s
database, and be able to pull the schedules for each student and present the information on a nice looking form.
The first major problem we had in creating this database was deciding on what features we were going to allow the users to be able to access. We quickly decided that we would allow them to only use the form so we locked down from everyone except me and Stephen. The next major issue we had with the project was during the testing phase. We could not get the email function to work. We kept getting a debug error that would not let us send the email out. After we figured out the debug error, the very next error was that we had set up the email to send out through Stephen’s
Novell account.
The email made a popup box pop up and made us choose Novell setting’s for each email. Considering that we would be sending out a bulk email to about 4000 parents and students, we had to go back in and find out why it was doing this. My problem solving skills were stretched to the limit in the face of this momentous task. Staying ahead of deadlines was also a hard thing to do as well. Having to keep up with my normal job duties, on top of daily nuisances that come up, as in repair registers or seeing if a port is bad on one of the switches all takes time away from what I needed to do for the project.
One thing I learned is that if you think you are done with a project just by doing everything you think
you want, you better think again. The sponsor of your project is in complete control and if they want to
add something at the last minute, you better find a way to make it fit in within reason. Andy, our project
sponsor, made us completely redesign what we thought was a perfect form, as well as asked for some features
that really made us rework some of the code in the database. One thing I am thankful for is taking that
Microsoft Access class with Mrs. Swafford. If not for those intense assignments, this project might not have
been possible for Stephen and me to complete. Actually, all of the classes that I had to take for TSTM were
of some use in this project, the key ones being TSTM 560, TSTM 564, TSTM 348, and TSTM 346. I really enjoyed
this job and I look forward to a lifelong career of technology related endeavors!
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