Proposal Afterthoughts

Now that proposals have been picked and teams have been chosen, I have taken some time to reflect on the process as a whole. My proposal was not picked, which is okay. Having spent some time reflecting on Professor Ackley's feedback, it seems as though my idea may have been too much for this semester. I still believe that it is doable, inevitable even, but not in this context with this amount of time.

This is kind of how I felt about most of my ideas, that they wouldn't be feasible in eleven weeks. I had a few ideas that I liked a lot better than both of the ideas I ended up proposing, but felt that it was not realistic for us to complete them in such a short amount of time. In retrospect, I probably should have ignored this notion and proposed them anyway. I felt that if I wasn't sure I could bring an idea to what I considered a complete version in the given time frame, I should not propose it at all. But I failed to realized that even a partially functional prototype may be worthwhile, or maybe not. That is something that is a bit scary about this course, I don't now how much is enough for anything. I am not really complaining about that, in fact I think that it is structured that way intentionally, nevertheless it is still a bit nerve racking.

On another note, I felt like I learned a lot about pitching a project through this process. While I was generally satisfied with my presentation style, I didn't get any traction from my peers on my project. I think that the problem was two fold, my proposal sounded like it would be rather difficult, and I failed to go through enough refinement on the project itself. Having had more time to think about my proposal, I think I would change a lot of things about how I described the implementation. I mean, this is how I am about everything though. As soon as I get done with a given section of code I am ready to declare it a terrible failure and start again (Regardless of the fact that the code actually functions fine). Nevertheless, I think in this case my proposal could have been truly helped by some more thought and refinement. A lesson for next time I guess. As far as it being a difficult, or rather time consuming, task, I don't think there is much to be done about that.

I supposed I feel a little bit disappointed that my projects didn't get great responses from my peers, but I think I have learned from the experience and will be able to do better next time.