The third course at the HHS was a minor course. When we have a minor course, we’re allowed to choose which course we want to follow, out of a pre-selected order of courses of course. It differs a lot from the full-time informatic courses, so it was a nice change of scenery. Arjen, Roy, Eise, mark and I chose to go for the International course. This is a course that is set up together with the international students that come to the university for studies (Hence the name). Any foreign student was welcome, no matter where they came from. We were told that we’d recieve three people from Polland and two from Turkey. The Turkish people never showed up, so we had the Pollish people to work together with. Everyone else was just from Holland, so the international part of this course was pretty small.

Summary
Course: KB-22 International Semester
Completed: May 2010

Gained Knowledge
Speaking and writing English (Though I already mastered it)
Large scale interviewing
Comparing and processing interview results
Being the project leader of a group of 10 (Me not included)
Holding a sales presentation

The entire course was set up to be done in English, which I really appreciated. I’ve always been a fan of communicating in English, because I feel my English is a lot better than my Dutch (I have no idea why). This is done to make sure our Pollish friends were able to communicate with us, of course. It was very fun to communicate in English for most of the time, during the 10 weeks. The project that we were going to do has been divided into two. The HHS had the problem that they would like to cater the foreign studies and minors in a better way. The idea was to create a sort of web portal, where all the academies within the HHS could work together to show their foreign study possibilities. The students would be able to provide feedback on the studies, such as rating it and giving comments, and all important information would be shown there, so that you would know exactly what you were in for, when you would go to that foreign place. This isn’t really a project that you could do in 10 weeks. Thi sis the reason why it was split into two, where we would plan, design and make the documents in the first 10 weeks. The second 10 weeks would be reserved for building a prototype.

This really still was too big, though. We were expected to interview ALL academies within the HHS within 10 weeks. We also had to complete the requirements, design all the designs and models and make sure all the documentation was ready for the next 10 weeks. We would have to go and “just” interview everyone, but that’s where the troubles started. A lot of the contact persons that we were provided did not answer, or answered way too late. We also found out that not every academy felt like working together and sharing their preciously gathered data with others. There also was another application that a lot of the academies already used, which meant that we also had competition for the whole thing. Why would academies, who invested money into the application, suddenly throw everything overboard for a group of students that are doing a minor for 10 weeks?

We spend most of our time working on the interviews, untill we were into the last couple of weeks of our course. We had quite a few interviews already and had a pretty good idea on how the application should loook and work. We made the conscious decision, to only work with those academies that did  want to work with us and use them as beta testers for the prototype. We also made the decision, to upgrade the existing application that those academies were running, because this application already stored all the information we wanted and we already approached the creator of the application. He was pretty excited about the idea.

Eventually I held a presentation of about an hour. I explained about everyting we did, how we got to the idea and how we could realize the prototype. The next 10 weeks would be spend cooperating with the creator of the existing application, so we could make sure that everyone got what they wanted and that there wouldn’t be any competition or rivalry with already existing applications.

Sadly our proposal was shot down in the next course. I was already back to my regular courses in Informatics, but I really was bummed to see that.

I learned a lot about the Pollish culture, which is a nice addition to the mix. Our Pollish friends were very surprised with the way we casually interact with our teachers. We treat eachother morelike colleagues rather than teacher/student, so we have a very informal relation. The first time that we met our Pollish friends, they stood up and bowed when the teachers came! We found this very funny, but it is normal in Polland. Teachers are lords and masters there.