It feels like it has been a lot since my last face to face interaction with anyone.
This semester started like every other semester, but there was this news about a new virus spreading out from China. On those days, there were really few people who thought life would be transformed this way.
This has been a whole journey for everyone, with almost no time to prepare (we actually had some time, but no one expected this levels of contagion).
I remember the first moments of suspension of classes. I was in my entrepreneurship class (I hated that course), and everyone received the email announcing the stop of academic activities for a week. My first thought was that I would not have to go again to that horrible class.
After that, it has been like two months (almost three), and I miss socialization as an introvert is weird to express it, but I really miss some human interaction.
But besides that I miss real human interactions, I have been socializing more with a lot of my friends thanks to technology, before this virus I met my friends like once a month, and now at least once a week I have video calls to chat or play.
Returning to the academic side of things, I’ve always been a self-learner, so the school hasn’t been difficult, and at this time, I’ve had the opportunity to just play with my switch (Animal Crossing was the best release possible for this times) while the class goes in the background.
The difficult parts have been when professors try to do the same as always for their online courses. The idea of sitting there listening to a lecture that I can’t ignore with my switch because the professor randomly starts attacking with questions or activities (yeah, I’m looking at you Entrepreneurship class) for 3 hours, is horrible.
Besides this, it has been an experience for learning, learning how to organize my personal life with my student life. Before, I used to forget all my personal life when at school (I basically used to escape from that life), and now there was no other option than learning how to deal with it.
TI2011
About my TI2011 class, in general, it changed the dynamic, but the transition was so natural that, in a way, it feels like the class never changed.
I finished reading the book last week. In general, it was a good book about project management, but it was a so-so novel. I personally missed some content from the point of view from the programmer, on how they felt the administration changes and all that stuff.
I learned some stuff from that book that I never even thought about, some other stuff I considered it obvious, but in the end, it opened my desire to learn more about project management, and that’s why I bought The Mythical Man-Month to learn more about this world.
This course was fantastic in different ways. In the background, we were learning about project management with the book. During the class, we were also learning some stuff about it but a lot more about several kinds of topics, thanks to all the speakers we had (thanks a lot Ken!).
The future of project management
I actually don’t have that much to write about it, in my opinion, is not going to change that much, but there is going to be a really important factor in place, the managers now really need to look for their people if they’re suffering some kind of abuse or have problems in their home that are not that easy to talk about.
The other factors are going to be basically the same, video meetings and updates on the project using the tools available (instead of daily stand-ups or stuff like that), and maybe, just maybe the team is going to be more productive thanks to less useless meetings because now there is more stuff to take care of.
What’s next
Well…
While writing these words, a Hackaton I participated in just ended, and it was an exciting experience to work remotely with my friends to try to achieve a project (we lose, but at least we were in the finalists). The dynamics of learning how to balance personal life and everything else was a challenge for us, but we learned a lot (If you ever read this, guys, I’m really proud of you).
I know that the incoming future is going to be like this, everything online, or at least most of it, we lived in a privileged era where we can do this kind of stuff, I can’t imagine what it could have been even a few years back.
I have an incoming remote internship with Facebook in the next weeks, so I’m excited about it, sad because I wasn’t able to travel to NY, and terrified because I know it’s going to be a really different experience from what I learned in my past internships.
The weather these last days has been insanely hot, and I just noticed that I had missed the last two Mexican summers, and that’s why it really shock me, I hope it gets better, and the electricity bill doesn’t go that high because of the fans.
For next semester, I’m planning to work with Oracle, my school said that they are looking for a hybrid model (some online courses and a few in-person), but I still doubt that it is going to be possible to go back to campus this soon.
There is a lot to look forward to, and I’m excited about it. In a way, I hope it’s over to be able to interact with everyone I care in person, but I know that lots of things are going to be different. And yeah, I’m looking forward to continuing learning and continue growing in these challenging but exciting times.
