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The Graduate Advisor. Luljan Bacaj, Amanda coffey, Darien Crute. What is “The Graduate Advisor”?. A technological solution to a real world problem in the school of business.
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The Graduate Advisor Luljan Bacaj, Amanda coffey, Darien Crute
What is “The Graduate Advisor”? • A technological solution to a real world problem in the school of business. • The problem: Advisement for potential and existing students looking to enroll in an MBA (or currently enrolled in) here at Iona is a laborious and time consuming process. • MBA students have limited time to take courses and courses are given only at certain times by the business school. • Figuring out how long it would take to complete the program is important to prospective students and it’s critical to enrolled students.
What is “The Graduate Advisor”? • Spending an hour evaluating every single prospective students appetite for the program and availability to take the courses is something that would take many man hours and currently does. • Our software solution intends to tackle this problem of advising every possible prospective student and enrolled student, but doing so in an automated fashion.
Backstory • Creating a system that would do this for the business department was already attempted, so this is an existing project. • Much like the Obamacare site – the project was initially dubbed a failure. • Version 2.0 – which we are working on is picking up from where that team left off. • After spending time with the previous system and gathering the requirements we decided to scrap everything but the data model.
Guiding Ideology – key points to success • Building this type of system is no easy undertaking, this is a web application that will handle many users and be used for marketing the MBA programs. • Not some simple website. • Building a system this large that will do everything out of the box on the first go is impossible that is why the first team failed.
Guiding Ideology – key points to success • The goal of our team is to provide a base system with functionality that targets all the pain points of the manual labor first. • Test – Test – Test and ensure the functionality we do provide is rock solid. Run through test files and test data and tightly coordinate with our client during the development period to ensure things work. • Secondly provide a system that is easily extendable and supportable by another computer science team taking this on next year.
Technology, Architecture and Design • Our guiding principles of providing a robust supportable and extensible system lead us to use the following technologies: • HTML 5 and JavaScript front end that will provide an easily accessible user interface that has reach across mobile and desktop devices. • A backend server side that utilizes ASP.NET MVC framework for decoupling the user interface the data model and logic. • SQL Server 2012 for database storage tightly integrates with ASP.NET MVC with query optimization handled by the Entity .NET object relational model. • All of the development for all of this handled in Visual Studio 2013 – all technologies provided free by Microsoft to students in computer science programs through the DreamSpark program.